Kind Folks Finish First: Sales And Career Lessons Toward Success With Sam Jacobs

Salespeople often have a bad rep; they are seen as sleazy, manipulative, and, sometimes, intense in the way they deal with others. It is time to change that misconception. Sam Jacobs, the founder and CEO of Pavilion, imparts the message through the book of the same name: Kind Folks Finish First. You don’t have to be ruthless to get ahead; kindness will get you there faster. In this episode, Sam joins us to tell us more about the book and highlights, along the way, the top sales trends we have seen this 2023. He discusses a value-first approach to sales and business, overcoming the notion of treating relationships transactionally. Sam also gives great food for thought about the way we look at our careers: should you do what you love? Why do you need side hustles? For more sales tips and insights that will lead you to success, tune in to this conversation!

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Kind Folks Finish First: Sales And Career Lessons Toward Success With Sam Jacobs

We all know that those of us who have chosen a life in professional sales chose a business discipline that's a little more tumultuous than many others. According to Gardner and others, as we all know, the tenure of somebody who's a sales leader is now less than two years the average tenure. The average tenure of a professional salesperson is also less than two years. It's a unique profession that we've dedicated our lives to.

This episode is going to be helpful to all of us because we're talking with Sam Jacobs. He is the Founder and CEO of Pavilion, a thriving community with more than 10,000 members around the world. Sam has led revenue teams at a number of different firms, including Behavox, The Muse, Livestream, Axial and Gerson Lehrman Group. He also started a very successful podcast called The Sales Hacker Podcast.

He has written a book called Kind Folks Finish First. I'd like to share a wonderful testimonial from somebody that we respect, Daniel Pink. He has been on our show. His book, To Sell Is Human, one of our favorite sales books of all time. Here's what he writes about Sam's book, Kind Folks Finish First, “This is an excellently crafted book with a badly needed message. You don't have to be an aggressive jerk to succeed in business. In fact, if you lead with generosity and fairness, your professional life will be better off and your whole world will be plain better.”

We had a great conversation with Sam Jacobs. I'm aided in the co-hosting duties by our old friend Dave Hanley, who leads sales for AdvertiseCast. Dave has led a number of startups to very successful exits, but he lived through all of the challenges, the ups and downs of being in a sales career as well. He helps me chat with Sam. We're going to be talking about some of the key elements of Kind Folks Finish First, why Sam founded Pavilion, the value people get from the community of sales professionals, how so you need to lead with a value-first approach, and what your values are as a business professional.

We got some interesting thoughts about people in sales nowadays because of that short tenure, we all need back doors. Side hacks, being critically important, we're not entirely dependent on our employers when these changes take place. I enjoyed meeting Sam. It’s a great book. I wish I read this book or had this book when I started my sales career. You should pick it up. It’s a great conversation. I enjoyed chatting with Sam. I think you're going to enjoy this show. When you do, please like and subscribe because that matters to us. Thank you for doing so. Here's Sam Jacobs.

We've got a couple of fantastic guests that I'm going to introduce in a second. We're going to be talking about Kind Folks Finish First, a spectacular book by Sam Jacobs, who is the Founder of Pavilion. It is important for professional sales. This show exists to try and improve the lives of salespeople with education. When we get mastery of what we do, we feel better. As always, we're trying to share some strategies, processes, and tools that help all of us get better. We're going to have a great conversation because Pavilion exists to do the same thing, to help salespeople achieve their potential.

I own a company called In The Funnel. We are a group of sales coaches and consultants that help companies sell better, but I'm delighted to introduce a couple of my guests here. I'm going to first start with Dave Hanley. Many of you know that Dave is a friend of In The Funnel and a longtime client for full disclosure.

Dave is the Chief Revenue Officer of AdvertiseCast, the podcast advertising division of Libsyn. Before entering the podcast industry, Dave co-founded several successful enterprise SaaS businesses in the insurance and risk management space. He was the Cofounder of AdvertiseCast back in 2017 based on his passion for consuming great podcasts. He had great timing. The company quickly became a leader in the space as the first and largest online podcast advertising marketplace. In 2021, AdvertiseCast was acquired by Libsyn. Now Dave works in with Libsyn. Dave, welcome.

Thanks. I'm happy to be here. It’s great to meet Sam. I’m looking forward to the conversation.

Thanks for joining. I would like to introduce Sam Jacobs. He is the Founder and the CEO of Pavilion. Many of you already know about Pavilion. He launched Pavilion originally as a revenue collective in 2016, then he bootstrapped the company to $10 million ARR or Annual Recurring Revenue. Before working with Elephant Ventures, he took $25 million in funding in growth financing.

Before Pavilion, Sam spent fifteen years as a Senior Revenue Leader in VC-backed companies in New York, including Gerson Lehrman Group, Axial, and there’s an interesting story there, Livestream and Vimeo, The Muse, and Behavox. Sam's story and journey has been well articulated in the book we're going to discuss here Kind Folks Finish First. Sam lives in the West Village of Manhattan with his wife and two dogs, William and Oswald. We're all pet lovers here. Oftentimes, when we've got Dave Hanley, we can see out his window and his horses in the background. Sam, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. I'm a happy customer of Libsyn. I’m delighted to be here.

Sam, we're chatting a little bit about the book because I did enjoy this book. I probably read a sales book every couple of weeks for the show as part of the joy of doing it. This one touched and resonated with me on a number of different fronts. Let me throw it over to you and get a little bit of a shorter story of your journey and what led you to write this book.

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

It’s my pleasure.

I've been in New York for many years, the second time. I came back to New York to begin working and startups in 2003. From 2003 to 2018, fifteen years, I worked as a salesperson effectively and as a revenue leader in high-growth companies. What happened to me was that, as I achieved what I thought would be greater degrees of success in my professional life, I began to realize diminishing levels of happiness, enjoyment, and job security.

I worked at this one place that was super successful, GLG, for seven and a half years, and then I worked at the places that you mentioned in the bio, Axial, for four and a half years, Live Stream for 18 months, The Muse for 9 months, and Behavox for 10 months. What was happening was that my ten years were shrinking in the opposite way that I expected because when I was growing up, I thought that as you become more senior, you'll become more secure and established. You'll achieve wealth and do all that stuff. It wasn't really happening for me.

The book is about the founding of Pavilion and it was about me coming to the epiphany that I could remove myself from the way that I had thought been taught to live my career and try to, which doesn't mean I'm perfect and I don't think I'm better than anybody, embody a different set of principles and see what would happen. The book starts on Friday, the 13th of October 2017, when I was fired from The Muse. That's another part of the journey, which is that I faced a lot of failures, terminations, and a certainly relevant in an economy like the one we're in for technology.

Kind Folks Finish First: The Considerate Path to Success in Business and Life

I was driving down the New Jersey Turnpike with a dog that's now passed away, Walter, in the back seat and with my partner in the front seat. I got a message from the CEO. I was using my phone. This was before Apple CarPlay became ubiquitous in cars. I was always using my phone as a GPS and Waze. I got a little notification. I pulled over and said, “I didn't even realize you'd be out of the office. Can you come back into the office first thing on Monday?”

I remember thinking, “She's not a morning person. She's not into first thing in the morning.” I'd gotten that three-line email before and I knew immediately what was happening, which was that I was being fired. That was a moment at which I decided to embark on a different journey. That journey led me to begin to build the Pavilion in earnest. I hate to sound too cliché or too woo-woo, as my coach would say, but it was a journey of self-actualization. It was a journey that led to where I am now.

That's effectively what the book was about. Fundamentally, to cut to the chase, the book is about a different set of values that I articulate and that I would share with the audience and with people that would read it that says, “You don't have to behave in a way that you've been taught or maybe some people have been taught. It doesn't have to be a dog eat dog, ruthless competition, or zero some.”

You don't have to treat relationships transactionally. Every time you help somebody, you don't have to get an invoice back in return. You can do things for the good of helping. It's not that it'll make you feel better, but that you'll die a popper, penniless, and destitute. This is a formula for professional success. I've used this formula to build the company that I now run and to help other people do the same.

First of all, there is so much to one pack there. This is what hit me so much. You're in your car. You're driving. You think everything's okay. You've seen it many times. The chapter one's title is Fired At The Rest Stop. You've got that weekend where you're going to go through this and you know you're walking into this meeting on Monday, and then you're going to get fired. This has happened multiple times. We may have been of a generation where we thought, “The longer we do this, the more stable our roles are going to be,” and so on and so forth.

As you aptly point out in chapter two, Gardner tells us the chief revenue officer is going to last eighteen months. Now you're going to go through this whole rigmarole again. For everybody who's going to go through some tumultuous times, there is that adage that said, “It's sunny as after it's darkest. Maybe we have to go through some of these things. Any of us who've had a little more to come of success, you've had some of those challenging times as well.”

It tugged at me. I related to that so much. I had a similar type of journey in some ways somewhere. Maybe I tapped out of companies before I was going to get fired. I was pretty happy at one point in time to tell people, “If I didn't like something, I just walked out of it.” In some sense, I was thinking, “I'm not going to be successful here. I'm going to tap out before they tap out.” Going through this journey, at some point in time, you get quite frustrated and go, “There's got to be a better way,” and leading to this abundance mindset.

Start to say, “It's not about me. It's not about what I'm making. Let's figure out how we put a little kindness into the world here. The fact that abundance begets abundance.” Before this journey, I thought there was some great wisdom in here about doing something you love, and we have a little shared interest. I'm back in my bar band again after years and years. We played at a historic club in Toronto on a Friday night. We went on at 10:00 PM and finished at about 12:15.

In the middle of that show, I realized my bedtime is 10:00 PM and there's a reason for that. I'm a drummer. I could feel my coordination leaving me pretty quickly as I was going through this gig. What did you do before you went into the world? What did it teach you about finding that idea about doing something you love?

As you alluded, I've got a background in music as well. I ran a record label out of school in the late ‘90s. We set up on a horse farm in the middle of Virginia. We thought we were going to start a commune. A bunch of people would come through the commune and record. I reference a bunch of like artists' collectives that people might know about from my indie rock days. What I realized in starting that record label was that, first of all, the music industry is like a pretty bad business. Also, when people say, “Do what you love,” it's not always the most useful advice.

There are a couple of reasons for that. The first reason is I believe in the power of experience. I'm not trying to stifle anybody's fulfillment or actualization. If you're whatever age you are, if you want to go out and start your own business or do your own thing, I support you as I did. I will tell you that the first thing is that I didn't know what I loved when I was entering the workforce. It takes some reps and experience. That's thing number one.

Thing number two is I find that people miscategorize what they “love.” Sometimes they identify the mission of the organization with the jobs to be done in that organization. They conflict with those two things. They say, “I love Lululemon. I want to work for Lululemon as a senior controller.” Being a senior controller in Lululemon doesn't mean you're doing yoga all day and hobnobbing with other celebrities who also love Lululemon. It means that you're looking at financial statements.

People miscategorize what they “love” and identify the mission of the organization with the jobs to be done in that organization and conflate those two things.

The final thing and most important thing is that if we're thinking about professional success, there's a Venn diagram. There are three things that are involved in that Venn diagram. There's what people are good, what they're interested in or what they love, and most importantly, there's where the market is moving. People underestimate or undervalue where the market is moving and what they're good at. They overvalue what they're interested in. I was interested in recording music. I love recording music. I've got a bunch of albums on Spotify. That doesn't mean that I should be a professional musician. That might mean that that's a fun hobby for me.

I needed to look at the fact that I was starting a record label at the rise of Mp3.com. Maybe recorded music is coming back a little bit, but fundamentally, there were about two decades there when the entire economy in the music industry fell apart. It was not a good time to start a record label. That doesn't make me less creative or less artistic. That's the reality of the world. The last thing I'll say in my long-winded way is that people don't distill the daily activities of a function. They put a label on the broad definition of the function. They say, “I don't like finance. I don't like sales.” Let's talk about salespeople. “I like sales,” or, “I would never do sales.”

What is sales? Sales is talking to people, being curious about them, figuring out what their problems are, and then figuring out if your product-solution service might be able to help that person solve that problem. That's one part of what sales is. Another part is, “Do you like long project-based work? You shouldn't work as an SMB seller with 30 days of sales cycles. Do you like instant gratification? Do you like to know that I do something, and very soon thereafter, I see the result from it?” Sales might be a good career option for you.

I find that a long-winded way of simply saying to an early career person, “Do what you love,” is not super helpful. I find that giving people a framework for how to think about it does a couple of things. One of them is it manages their expectations a little bit because the other thing that happens that is happening now with quiet quitting and employee disengagement is that everybody's been misled about the nature of work to a certain extent. Everybody's like, “Why do I not feel like I'm at church and the pastor is singing?” Sometimes, it's just work. Sometimes, that's what it is. It's not that every moment is going to be an epiphany when all you say is, “Do what you love.” It's not super helpful, when you're thinking about, “How do I practically build a career over decades as opposed to over months?”

Your friend, Dan Pink, has been on our show. One of my favorite books of all time, in addition to yours, is To Sell Is Human. It came around at the same time that we started this business many years ago. Dan Pink didn't come from a background in sales, but on the show, I asked him, “Why'd you write this book about sales if you had no background in sales?” He said there was such a disconnect with everybody that he knew in professional sales, but the stereotype of someone in sales as a pitcher, used car salesman, and all this. Everybody knew in professional sales were some of the smartest, most intellectually curious problem-solving people he knew out there.

That book is like a masterclass or an MBA for sales because his research is thorough, but he was trying to find ou. Of the 8 and 9 people in the US who aren't in professional sales, 1 in 9 are and 8 in 9 aren't. What percentage of their day do they spend trying to persuade somebody else to their point of view? It turns out it's 39% of the day. All half of every day, they're trying to convince somebody else to their point of view. Everybody's got this default, “I'm not in sales.”

We hear that often when we're training service technicians or something of that age, “I'm not in sales. I could never sell anybody anything.” It’s something's exactly like what you said. It's helping somebody achieve a better future and business outcome. At the end, I asked Dan, “Where do you see sales going?” He netted it out as saying, “Nowadays, professional B2B sales is management consulting. Anything that isn't that will be taken care of by automation or AI, etc., but true sales is management consulting.” Any of this resonate for you, Mr. Hanley?

I'm thinking about my background and how it relates. I went to school and I thought I was going to get into Finance. I decided after my second-year Accounting course that I hated it. I stumbled into more entrepreneurship. What you realize when you want to start a business and work on a new venture is that a large percentage of what you're doing is sales.

The key is being curious. What happened to my career is if you don't know what you're doing, which I didn't, and I got into an industry that I knew nothing about, I was, by nature, asking a lot of questions because I wanted to learn and curious. That came across as, “This is a great person to talk to. They're interested in our business, and they care about how they can help us.” For the most part, I was trying to learn, but what a lot of salespeople who are new to selling don't realize is that you don't show up and pitch. You have to ask questions, solve a problem, and communicate whether or not you can help add value and solve that problem.

There's a big conference called Collision. It is a technology startup conference. There are 36,000 people in Downtown Toronto. The energy and enthusiasm of walking around a conference like that is spectacular. There are a lot of startups. They've said it up. Startups, mid-tie, and growth organizations and lots of VC. Everybody gets a seat at the table. It's an interesting setup. I probably chatted with twenty startups going through and having conversations.

Not a single person in any of those things asks me a question. The best two questions I got I was somebody said, “What brought you to the conference?” Many said, “Tell me about your business.” I'm not joking. This was the guy taking my order in the coffee truck outside of the conference. This is the only person at the conference who asked me anything.

That makes me upset.

It gave us an opportunity when we were walking around. After I'd have these conversations with these startup founders, I'd share that and say, “Here are a couple of things to do next time if you're open to it. You might want to think about this question and get someone talking to you, plus you'll enjoy it more.” I could see when they were doing their pitch for the twentieth time that day, they were tired. I thought, “Ask a question. Get involved in an engaged conversation.”

I'm going to give a shout-out to the guy taking orders from Fleet Coffee when I was getting my cappuccino. Sam, tell us about the rest stop. Now, we've had this epiphany. It leads to 2016 or 2017. You'd always had a dinner club or a networking club for other people in your role. How does that evolve into what is now, the opportunity with First Revenue Collective and Pavilion? Tell us a little bit about that journey.

The first thing I would say is it began without any sense of expectation. There was either one in Toronto that David was putting together on sales or something like that. There was one in the Chicago Sales Assembly. My point is I didn't think that this was a venture-scale business. This was not some world-dominating master plan.

This was me saying, “I'm not solving backward,” from, “I need to have dominated the world by X, Y, Z year.” It is me saying, “I'm going to check out of the Merry-Go-Round or the carousel that I'm on, and I'm going to build something that I care about and that I love. I'm not going to worry too much about anything other than Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Is there going to be a roof over my head? Can I pay rent? Can I do what I love, which is helping people and connecting people so that they can achieve their career outcome?”

I got fired. It was the fall of 2017. I've written about this on LinkedIn. I said, “I can't be dependent for all of my income on one source of revenue anymore If I'm going to work for somebody else. I need ‘side hustles.’ The world is too uncertain for me to put all of my eggs in a basket that somebody else totally controls and can decide at any moment that I'm no longer suitable for the basket. I'm going to build a consulting business. I'm going to take this dinner club, try and monetize it. I'm not trying to monetize it so that I can be on the cover of Time Magazine. I'm not trying to be Elon Musk. I'm just trying to do something that I care and am passionate about that frankly can't be taken from me.”

That was the origin of it. From there, there were 22 people then. I said, “Everybody, we're going to charge dues on January 1, 2018. Who's in?” 20 out of 22 people said, “I'm in. I’m not sure what I'm paying for, but I'm up for it,” and then we grew from there. People started hearing about what we were doing all over the world and people from other cities started reaching out now. Why did they?

One thing I think is sometimes people don't know why they're successful, but if I had to guess, there was a point of view behind the community. It wasn't networking for its own sake. It was, “What do we believe about the world? How should we align and what do we still believe about the world to this day?” We believe a couple of things. First of all, there has been a little bit of undue influence focused on CEOs and investors and not enough care is taken for the people that run and operate those companies.

As a consequence of that, we still teach people how to negotiate and what they're entitled to when it comes to executive compensation. What I want for everybody is that you don't have to be this founder or CEO to lead a meaningful and fulfilling life. There's a role for an executive operator at a company, but that role needs to be renegotiated because the old deal wasn't working very well. That was a big part of what attracted people to the community, which is that there was a latent point of view that was articulated.

You don't have to be this founder or CEO to lead a meaningful and fulfilling life.

When we do worse in our Incarnation, which is 10,000 people, it's because we're not doing enough to articulate that point of view that we're not clear enough in why we exist and what we stand for. That was one of the big reasons why people begin to come to us. We grew over the course of 2018. I worked one more place full-time, and then I got fired. I was having breakfast with a mentor and I said, “I'm going to try and work on Pavilion full-time, but if it doesn't work, I'll go back to being a CRO,” and he smiled and said, “I think we've tried that experiment at this point.” I won't say the rest was history. It's been a lot of stops and starts, mistakes, and great outcomes.

We're in the middle of our next phase of evolution, which is about getting back to our roots and re-embracing the ideas that got us here in the first place, which is a point of view that we exist for the individual operator first and foremost. We want to train that person not just to be a good employee but to be an actualized and self-realized human. That might mean consulting and advisory business like you've done. We want to teach people how to have a career. A career is not you work one place for twenty years anymore. It's a series of gigs, advisory roles, and consulting jobs. It is the combination of all of those things in the accumulation of all those experiences over time, which hopefully lead to wealth, impact, better relationships with your partners, and that whole thing.

The path there is always, “Are you enjoying what you're doing?” You talk a lot about you weren't fulfilled in many of the roles leading up to it. You have this epiphany. I've always felt the same way that, finally, when I did this, it felt like this is what I was meant to do, but I needed that corporate journey for twenty years to teach me something that was valuable. I needed that experience. I needed to do massive and smaller deals. I needed to run big teams and small teams. I needed to learn something that was valuable if I could add my own unique ability there.

We were talking that there a little bit about the side hustle and consulting. Chapter seven is Every Crisis Is An Opportunity. You do talk about this. This is very helpful for folks reading this, which is the rules of compensation. There's some great coaching in this book as to, “If you're negotiating that next deal, what should you think about?” You have five things that you're entitled to when it comes to compensation. 1) Due diligence. Do your investigation number. 2) Aligned compensation, liquidity by the way. I'm getting options, “Am I ever going to get them out?” We'll talk about double triggers a little later on.

Negotiate the severance upfront and think about that, which is one of the ways you got a little breathing space to get into this, and then consult, talking about how you build something on the side for you that no matter what, you're allowed to continue on doing. With In The Funnel, we work with a lot of people who do exactly that. They may have been a client of ours at some point, like Dave, then over time, they start to work with us because they've got their own consulting businesses on the side. It's a great model for them. It's a fantastic model for us.

Here's the other thing I love reading that chapter about negotiation. Understand what you'd like and then what you're willing to agree with. Most people don't understand how to negotiate. You underlined this a few times. Don't bluff. I don't know where we were taught to negotiate and being tough, mean, and banging at the table. At one point in time, we negotiated a $1 billion deal. I've never been scared in my life, but the one thing I knew I wasn't going to do was lie at the table. I've never been over my head ever. When we're negotiating it, the only thing I had was my character and integrity. Don't make a commitment you can't adhere to. Don't bluff. That is not a TV show. That's very good coaching for everybody out there. Comments, Mr. Hanley?

Mark and I were talking about this piece of the book before. It took me back. I've worked with Mark for many years. I don't remember how many years it has been. One of the original big learnings I had from Mark was on negotiation. You're trying to work a big deal and we said, “The price is X,” and the client is looking for Y. Trying to find that win-win and what's important.

It is asking the question saying, “We gave you a price of $100,000. You want it for $80,000. What else is important? Is it the timing? Can you wait? Do you want it now? What other levers can we pull to get something that works for both of us? Can you pay a little bit upfront as opposed to the back end?” It is asking those questions to figure out how we can negotiate and come to an agreement. We're not lying, bluffing, or throwing red herrings. It's more of asking the right questions and trying to find something that works for both parties.

Make the pie bigger. It's not about a bigger piece of the pie. It is trying to think about, “How do we make the pie bigger?” There's got be that trust and authenticity to have that conversation. I don't know if the book answers directly, but we have a conversation and it seems you are the wisest, most balanced person out there. What was happening that you were getting dismissed frequently or why, in your view, are CRO only lasting eighteen months in their job? Pavilion must see a ton of this with the on-the-bench and so on and so forth. What's going on that the tenure of this role as short?

Let's speak about me first. I don't think I'm blameless at all. I can be a difficult person to work with. When you're a C-level executive working for CEO, what you have to understand fundamentally is that it's their company. They can call it a partnership. You can call it the first team. You can read The Five Dysfunctions Of A Team by Pat Lencioni. It is their company. You work in service to them.

I always joke about where if you're in a romantic relationship with somebody else, they yell at you, but they don't get over grievances with you and they don't leave. They seem to want us to stay. That was me. That was being disgruntled and saying, “I could do it better. If I could do better, I should go do it better because it's their company.” This idea of, “If I was being frustrated with the potential of an opportunity without acknowledging the reality of it, that's my fault. That's not anybody else's problem. Those idiots won't listen to me. That's my problem and not their problem.” That's how I was. I've always felt like I was probably a better startup CEO than I was a startup employee, but I never had anything that I was working on of any size or scale. Now, thank God, I do. Lo and behold, I haven't been fired since 2016 when I got this thing off the ground. That's a great thing.

Let's speak more broadly to the tenure of a CRO. There are a lot of factors at play. I don't think that there's an enemy. There's no bad person or good person in this equation. The first thing is we're working in a world that is changing more rapidly by the day. That's true. We're talking about AI. It's not that AI was invented with ChatGPT, but this hype cycle was created in November 2022. It already feels like we've been talking about it forever. The world is changing more quickly than it used to be.

We're working in a world that is changing more rapidly by the day.

Many of us have watched Mad Men, where Don Draper goes to launch, has three martinis, and then goes to take a nap. That's fine because nothing happens that quickly. They had telephones. They didn't have pager or iPhones. The pace of business was slower. That's one thing I think. The second thing I think is if we're going to work at high-growth companies in particular, we do have to acknowledge that $2 million business that grows to $6 million or $8 million over two years, and this is true for us, we went from $4 million to $17 million over two years, the things that I need an executive to do at $4 million company are different things. It's a different company.

The only reason it's become clear to all of us is because we are choosing to work in these high-growth inorganic environments, but in the old days, that was seen as extraordinary growth. It wasn't true. Things don't grow in 200%. It was technology that enabled this. The last thing I'll say, which is part of the work frankly of Pavilion, is community unto itself is not that interesting. Community with a point of view is more interesting because there's something to rally around.

There's a point of view that founders, CEOs and investors don't know how to make money. In fact, most CRO’s don't know how to make money. What do I mean by that? This is related to what you said about the Bill of Rights about those five things. The second thing that you mentioned was the line compensation. There's this world that we've lived in for a long time, which is the senior sales leader, the chief revenue officer, and the VP of sales should be the highest-paid person at the company. That's because the salesperson brings in all the money, but that's not true.

That's not where money comes from. Money comes from the product, marketing sales, customer success, and partnerships all being in alignment. If you want to add more money, you need happy customers. You get happy customers from a good product. You get people aware of your product because you have great marketing.

This whole idea that, “We're going to hire the savior salesperson that used to work at Salesforce, Adobe, or Oracle. They're going to come in, transform our business, and we're going to pay that person $700,000 a year, but we're going to pay him $350,000 base and $350,000 commission. When that doesn't happen because it's not the senior sales leader, we're going to fire that person. We tried to hire the savior. The savior didn't work, back to the drawing board. Let's find the next savior.”

In fact, the process of building long-term sustainable businesses is alignment across the go-to-market organization, which is another perspective that Pavilion shares. That's part of the education that I'm on. Prior to this session, I was teaching the first session of Pavilion's CRO school. We were developing a theory of enterprise value. What is that about? That is about, “Let's set a foundation for how money gets made.” It's not hiring the salesperson with lots and lots of meetings and no process can still make money for the business.

The salesperson with the absolute best medic process and everything is qualified and put into Salesforce, but if there are no meetings at all, that person will get fired. That is the line on how value is created, but to the point of the eighteen months, lots of people aren't aligned on how value is created. Investors, CEOs and founders, particularly those who come from technical and product backgrounds, don't know what's supposed to happen. They think, “I hire a salesperson and money comes out a month later,” and they understand, “Not really.”

That's a great explanation. We've asked that question 50 times on this show. Does that resonate for you, Dave?

I was thinking about how it relates to what you talk about a lot. Parachute in this amazing salesperson and they can make it rain, but there has to be alignment in terms of going back to the core of what you like to talk about, which is the value proposition of the business. What problems do you solve? All that needs to be throughout every aspect of the organization. Marketing needs to talk to that. Customer service needs to know that. That needs to emanate from them as well. A lot of times, somebody, maybe like the person who's running the business, doesn't even know how to articulate their value proposition, but they expect a salesperson to come in, go out there, and make magic. That's not going to happen.

I created this stuff for the CEO and founders that I advise. I said, “You got to invest in marketing before sales. I don't mean you hire all marketing before you hire a single salesperson, but the function needs to be excellent.” They say, “I got it. I've been doing some research on marketing and I had a director of demand gen because I'm doing what you said, and nothing's happening.” I'm like, “Demand gen is FedEx, logistics, and putting a message in front of a certain group of people at a certain time so that they'll take action. What's the message? What are you putting in the container?” He is like, “What do you mean what's the message?” “Our thing is great and that everybody else is for it.”

That's features and functions.

They come out of meetings where it falls down and they go, “She didn't get it.” In front of a client, they can't articulate it. The client doesn't even understand what they're talking about. It's gibberish. They pointed the client going, “She didn't get it. She's not right for us.” The hard work is boiling the old Albert Einstein. If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

If somebody works with your company, “What's unique and different about you?” “Application development shops or 100,000 different application development shops.” How do these people differentiate? It's all the same. The hard work is in capturing this to enable the sales organization to be successful or enable the marketing team. This is hard work. It's not self-evident work.

The last thing I'll say is you give that speech to them and they say, “How long does that take to create the right message?” You're like, “It takes a long time. I don't have a long time. I sold these investors on the promise of proft this year, but I think I'm going to go hire more salespeople.”

That's exactly what everybody's done with the VC money until they're worn anymore, or until you couldn't do it anymore and the prices kept going up, and the model doesn't work. I should point the finger to In The Funnel here. We're in the same boat as everybody else. We came up with value proposition messaging many years ago. It came from me, and we thought it worked, it would go through the organization, and then it became this mantra that everybody was repeating. We were teaching it in our CRO school one day.

Somebody put up their hand and said, “That's not your value proposition because it used to be, ‘We help companies sell better. Companies come to us when revenue growth is stagnated or the sales team is underperforming.’” Our first 50 clients came to us because of that, then we're in this workshop with 60 people in 15 hands go up and go, “I saw why we're here. Our sales team is killing it, but we want to keep them. Your value proposition is wrong.” They were absolutely right. We're coaching people like Dave Hanley, killing it, exiting 2 and 3 times. He's not in trouble at all. He just wants to keep getting better.

Unfortunately, not everybody has clients that'll tell them that. They'll give them that feedback.

There's not a one-time thing and you are refining it after 100 client meetings. It's an ongoing process. It's not complicated. It's not easy. None of this is an easy fix. What would you coach or counsel? We have our pal, Frank Cespedes, from Harvard. You probably know Frank. He hass written 7 or 8 books. The latest one is called Sales Management That Works. In that book, he talks about, “If you graduate college or university today, there's a 50% chance 1 in 2 of those people will have some role in professional sales in their lifetime.” That's what the stats seem to be. He's pulled up the stats.

What would you tell somebody graduating in college or university? Where would they go? When I did it, there were places to get the world's best sales education. I could go to Xerox. I did go to Kodak. That's where I started. I was in a different country at Sales University for 90 days or 4 months before I ever saw a client or IBM. What does somebody do now in your view? Where do they go? Pavilion?

I think so. The truth of the matter is that Pavilion is more an executive community than an entry-level community. You should come to Pavilion if you want to learn how to be an executive. We have this concept of associate and analyst memberships, but those memberships are focused on education. It's a hard question nowadays. If you'd asked me this before, I’d still probably give the same answer that you gave, “Go to work at Oracle, ADP, Paychex, Xerox, or a company that has the resources and infrastructure to train you.” In the same way that before you should go work for a hedge fund, you probably work at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, or Merrill Lynch so that you can get trained in the core foundations of your craft before you move on to a higher level functions.

I'd still say that, but I'm not sure that those people are hiring. The other thing I would caution is that the role of the sales development rep used to be the perfect entry-level role. There are still people who are hiring SDRs, but I do think that that role is challenged more than it has been in the past because the rote automation of all of these technologies that are creating millions of emails and trillions of text messages is diminishing people's attention span and their ability to engage.

That said, I would invest in your own education outside of a core company providing for it. That might be Pavilion, SV Academy or Sales Assembly, but it's something that gives you some exposure. Fundamentally, now more than ever, your career is your responsibility. Nobody is going to be looking out for you in the way that you might hope or expect.

Now more than ever, your career is your responsibility. Nobody is really going to be looking out for you in the way that you might hope or expect.

It's a very good advice. You've got to take control of your own career now. It’s a different one. There are lots of opportunity, but I think that's sage advice. Dave, any final questions for Sam?

Mark and I were chatting about one of the aspects of the book that we already touched on a little bit with compensation. I am wondering if you had any advice for somebody who is a founder that is leading a business and bringing in a sales function. What advice do you give to them on how they should craft a sales compensation plan for a team that aligns properly with what the organization is trying to do? I've been in that situation a few times. It's hard to find the perfect model. I’m curious about your thoughts on that.

A couple of thoughts, the first is that before you hire someone else to sell, you better have done it yourself. That's a prerequisite. It's not, “I have this great product. Go sell it.” You have to have done it. I don't care what you think about your sales capabilities. If you can't sell it, they definitely can't sell it. You have a founder and CEO on your business card or email signature and they don't. You should get between 5 to 20 clients on your own as a founder before you go out and look to invest in the sales function.

The next thing I would say is if you want to hire your first 1 or 2 salespeople, what should be their comp plan? Quota implies predictability. If you don't have predictability, then I don't think we should be talking about quotas. What we want to do is define a very generous commission structure. First, you show that you can sell it, then you need to show somebody other than you can sell it.

You're not going to be able to pay that person very much in base salary. Maybe we give them 20% of every sale. Maybe we give them a year. If they make too much money and we feel annoyed that they need so much money, let's consider that a great success. That would have been way better if they made too much money than not enough.

From there, once we have a little bit of predictability, then we can start to design some comp structure. At scale, 20% of bookings does not work. There are a lot of companies that were paying 15% or 20%. The math of that in an interest rate environment that is normalized as opposed to where there's free money does not work. The number that tends to work better than others is 10%. You need to be able to show that 10% plus base salary equals an amount of money that can pay that person's bills. The benchmarks, which many people know but are roughly 10 times base, should be the quota or 4 times OTE. If you're an account executive and your OTE or On-Target Earnings is $150,000 and that $75,000 base and $75,000 commission, then your quota should be $750,000.

Those are great metrics take away. Those are very helpful.

The main thing I would say is too many people are like, “We're building a revenue model to get to $2 million in IRR.” I'm like, “Below $2 million IRR, the revenue model is interesting, but we should be thinking about milestones the business needs to hit that work towards predictability as opposed to working backward from the spreadsheet.”

The first thing I get into would be your specific curriculum for the CRO school. I'd be very interested in that, given what we do. There are lots of great stuff to share there. We've had a good taste Of Kind Folks Finish First. One of the things that I didn't get when I started in professional sales was a sense of self-esteem or pleasure for being in professional sales. When I started, it felt like a default because at that point in time, I was done with MBA, my friends were in investment banking, and they were lawyers. It felt like I took the easy route until I realized it was the best job ever. I wish I had this book many years ago. You've got it now, Kind Folks Finish First: The Considerate Path To Success In Business And Life, Sam Jacobs with Kerri Linsenbigler. Sam, how do people learn more about you and Pavilion?

You can email me at Sam@JoinPavilion.com. You can follow me on LinkedIn, where some other people have chosen to do that. You can go to JoinPavilion.com.

Dave, how do people find you?

I'm in the podcast business, both on podcast hosting and technology, as well as advertising. The hosting company is called Libsyn.com and then the advertising side is AdvertiseCast.com. Anybody who is interested can check that out.

First of all, thank you very much for joining and taking time out of your valuable time. There's been huge value to the audience. I want to thank the readers. We run this show to try and help improve the performance and professionalism of the B2B sales team and improve the lives of professional salespeople. That's what we're trying to do here. I know there are things we can do to improve. You're the ones who tell me that. We love constructive criticism.

If you like this show, please like and subscribe. That matters to us. If there are things that we can do to elevate this show and make it more valuable to you, please let me know. My personal email is MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. We love constructive criticism. Please be direct. Anybody who sends us a note gets a nice note back from us. We'll respond to every piece of advice. Thank you for joining. We'll see you next episode. Sam and Dave, thank you so much for joining. We'll see both of you again soon, I hope.

Thank you so much for having me. Dave, it’s great to meet you. Take care.

Important Links

• Pavilion

• The Sales Hacker Podcast

• Kind Folks Finish First

• Daniel Pink – Past Episode

• To Sell Is Human

• AdvertiseCast

• The Five Dysfunctions Of A Team

• Sales Management That Works

• Sam@JoinPavilion.com

• LinkedIn – Sam Jacobs

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

About Sam Jacobs

Sam Jacobs is the Founder & CEO of Pavilion. He launched Pavilion as Revenue Collective in 2016 and bootstrapped the company to $10M in ARR before taking on a $25M growth financing round in early 2021.

His early vision of Pavilion was about more than creating a community to help salespeople excel at work. He wanted to turn centuries of so-called business wisdom on its head. Sam believed in a world where reciprocity, generosity, and kindness could be good for business—a world where self-interest was replaced with community and everyone could get ahead.

Pavilion has proven Sam’s hypothesis many times over, growing into a $200 million professional development company that helps its members get through giving. Prior to Pavilion, Sam spent 15 years as a senior revenue leader at VC-backed companies in the New York area including Gerson Lehrman Group, Axial, Livestream/Vimeo, The Muse, and Behavox.

Story Selling: Six Key Principles To Level Up Your Sales Prowess With Bernadette McClelland

All sales leaders and salespeople face three challenges: finding the right level of connection with the buyer, having the right depth of conversation with that buyer, and increasing the rate of conversion. Sales thought leader Bernadette McClelland finds the root cause of these challenges in the stories involved, whether these are the stories we tell ourselves as salespeople or the stories we tell the buyer. In this conversation, Bernadette McClelland unpacks the concept of “story-selling” and shares its six essential principles that will take your sales prowess to the next level. She also talks about the key things discussed in her latest book, SHIFT and DISRUPT: Stop Selling Widgets. Start Selling Wisdom. Prepare to take some notes as we pick the mind of one of the greatest selling wisdom purveyors anywhere!

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Story Selling: Six Key Principles To Level Up Your Sales Prowess With Bernadette McClelland

Thank you very much for your great words of encouragement while we took a little bit of an extended vacation here in the summer. We did take a trip to Italy and eat way too much pizza and pasta, Donna and I, but we’re back at it now, and we’re so excited. We’ve got some wonderful shows coming your way as we lead up to the end of Q4 2023. None better, by the way, than the one that’s coming at you right now. I had a fantastic conversation with Bernadette McClelland. Bernadette is with 3 Red Folders, that’s her consulting company.

She’s written a wonderful book called SHIFT and DISRUPT: Stop Selling Widgets. Start Selling Wisdom. This is Bernadette’s sixth book and she’s had some great testimonials in her books. I enjoyed this. The core concept we get into this is talking about story selling. That’s opposed to storytelling. We’ve had, as you know, a number of guests on the show talking about storytelling, which for the most part takes us through the hero’s journey.

Bernadette differentiates with story selling, the model she came up with. She did it to actually address three key issues a lot of sales leaders and salespeople face when they’re going to market. 1) Finding the right level of connection with a buyer. 2) Having the right depth of conversation with the buyer. 3) Increasing the rate of conversion as we work through these sell cycles to get to closure. These are three challenges most sales leaders and salespeople face.

The root cause that Bernadette came up with for these challenges is the stories involved, whether these are the stories we tell ourselves as salespeople, the stories we tell the buyer or the stories we elicit from the buyer. Some of the principles of great story selling that Bernadette comes up with and we discuss in this episode are six of them. Story selling inspires change. It’s root cause-focused. It’s a strategy in pictures. It helps to de-risk decisions for the buyer. It increases collaboration and generates wisdom and meaning. It’s a great conversation with Bernadette.

One of our other books, by the way, is called, When You Are Going Through Hell, Keep On Going. What a title. By the way, some good advice. I enjoyed speaking with Bernadette. I’m sure you’re going to enjoy this episode. When you do, please continue to like and subscribe to The Selling Well show and tell your friends because that matters to us. Thank you for doing so. Here’s Bernadette McClelland.

Bernadette, thanks so much for joining the show. It’s so great to meet you.

Same here. Thank you so much for the invitation.

I haven’t completed the whole book, but I enjoyed SHIFT and DISRUPT: Stop Selling Widgets. Start Selling Wisdom. It’s impossible for that to be a bad idea. We’re going to unpack what story selling means. I love your approach here. Bernadette, to start, let’s talk a little bit about your journey in professional sales. How’d you get here?

It’s been a journey, hasn’t it?

It always has. It always is.

Journey with lots of turn-backs, dead ends, and freeways where you go for it. I’m fortunate I was granted immediate residency to live in the United States. The reason I’m sharing that is because the way that I came over was based on immigration and the US government recognizing the fact that I am an alien. I’ve always been like an alien, but I have an exceptional ability in sales leadership. That means a lot to me because when I first wanted to go into sales in corporate Australia, I was a sales coordinator and I was doing all the commissions and doing all the orders for the sales guys back in the ‘80s. It was like, “He’s earning that much?”

SHIFT and DISRUPT: Stop Selling Widgets. Start Selling Wisdom

I applied, but they kept knocking me back by saying that I wasn’t aggressive enough. I didn’t have what it took to be in sales, and I was too nice. I hope that I’ve dialed back the aggressive part that did come out that enabled me to get the job. My journey over the years has taken me from corporate Australia through small business in Australia owning a family business, a wholesale, retail, and importing business, and coming full circle back to running my own consultancy. That’s been the journey.

You’ve got some wonderful testimonials from some of the biggest names in the industry like Jeb Blount and Tony Robbins. Folks will certainly check out those as we move forward. What an interesting piece of feedback back to the ‘80s where somebody would get coaching that you are too nice to be in sales, not aggressive enough. Right now, we wonder why there’s this 50-year-old stereotype about a professional salesperson that’s completely wrong. Of course, it’s wrong. Those of us who know anything about sales know that stereotype is inaccurate.

In fact, it was the impetus for Dan Pink. You quote Dan Pink multiple times in SHIFT and DISRUPT, but he wrote to sell as human. He saw such a gap between that stereotype of professional sales and what he saw when he was interacting with his own personal contacts and professional sales who were intellectually curious, great at problem-solving, and creative. We had him on the show a little while back.

In the end, I asked him why he wrote the book. That’s what he told me. He said, “There was such a gap between the stereotype that didn’t apply and where we are now.” This is your sixth book. In this episode, we’re talking about SHIFT and DISRUPT. Prior to that, The Art of Commercial Conversations. The First Sale is ALWAYS to Yourself and 25 Ways NOT To Lose Your Next Sale!. What are the two other books?

When You Are Going Through Hell, Keep On Going.

That’s good coaching.

SMASH Through Your Sales Barrier! was my very first book.

I may get the book wrong, but I appreciated the authenticity of your story. After writing 25 Ways NOT To Lose Your Next Sale! I think it was Matt Church who asked you and said, “Does this book inspire you?” You said no.

I was doing a lot of work with Matt Church. He’s the Founder of Thought Leaders Global out of Sydney, a wonderful community. He did. I worked with him. The book was The First Sale is ALWAYS to Yourself. It was my first attempt at moving my writing into a more thought leadership style bringing in my own IP, mental models, and all of that. Matt said to me, “Bernadette, did it inspire you?” I, hand on heart, it didn’t. What I was doing there, in my growth and in my experimentation, was writing, thinking, and bringing some form of wisdom into my writing. It was probably a little bit too much left-brained, and that’s okay. For ourselves to be inspired, there has to be a spark of something.

SHIFT and DISRUPT has brought together the rational thinking that you mentioned. There’s research in there, but there’s also a story. There’s also that inspirational component because not only us as sales professionals but our buyers need that combination as well. When we think about the fact that our oldest form of communication is story and our oldest form of commerce is selling, it made sense to bring the two together, create this portmanteau, and lean into story selling as a concept and philosophy. Not a methodology, but as a philosophy.

I did a little bit of research before I created my model. Everywhere I looked, we hear story selling, but it’s usually about marketing, presentation skills, brand management, or it’s bringing in the hero’s journey. I wanted it to be different and practical. There are some wonderful experts out there in the storytelling space. I wanted to recognize them as well, but I also wanted to bring in a flavor that took a salesperson’s or sales professional’s conversations to not just a higher level but a deeper level because that’s what our buyers are wanting now.

It’s an interesting delineation. We’ve had a number of guests on the show about storytelling and probably one of the more popular books out there is Building a StoryBrand.

Yeah, absolutely.

It always speaks of the hero’s journey. It actually makes that reference and says, “What you’re doing with your storytelling is you’re making the buyer the hero of the journey, but you’ve got to go through that process.” From the book, when you’re trying to differentiate or delineate between storytelling and story selling, which we’ll get to in a second, you actually say story selling is a philosophy that helps a business, its leadership, and its sales team shift how they think and feel about achieving their business outcomes and revenue goals while ethically supporting the buyer.

It helps them see the gaps they didn’t know existed and find puzzle pieces they never knew they were missing. The approach you’re taking here is by going at this way and taking a little bit of a different approach, not only am I helping the buyer but I’m actually helping my team. In doing so as a leader, that means I’m helping myself. Tell me a little bit about how else we differentiate storytelling from story selling.

To begin with, it is based on a model. It’s based on what I refer to as the story-selling circles. To keep it simple, what I’d like to start with is the concept that growth sits at the center of a Venn diagram. We are going to imagine that there’s a Venn diagram. Growth sits at the center. It doesn’t matter if it’s for our buyer. We want to help our buyer and their business grow. We also want our own business to grow as well. Growth is the center.

We then think, “What are the three key challenges that a sales leader faces with their sales team or a sales person faces in going to market?” Those three challenges typically are the right level of connection, to start with. If we think about a salesperson’s role is to go out there and to approach the decision maker. There’s this right level of connection. Once that happens, it’s like, “What’s the depth of conversation? How can we stop playing in the shallows? How can we take our conversations deeper?” Connection is a challenge. The depth of conversation is a challenge and then the rate of acceleration of the pipeline conversion is a challenge. Those are the three challenges that I believe a sales leader faces with their team and also a salesperson faces in going to market.

The root cause of those challenges is found at the intersections. This is where story selling comes into play because when we look at the root cause of the challenges, what’s stopping connection, conversations, and conversions is typically three stories. Those three stories are the stories that the salesperson tells themselves about the buyer, the deal, the complaint, or whatever it may be. It’s the internal stories that the salesperson tells themselves about the buyer. The external stories are the stories the salesperson tells their buyer. Finally, it’s the essential stories. They are the stories the salesperson must elicit from the buyer.

The outcome is growth. We’ve got the three challenges of connection, conversation, and conversion. We’ve got the three root causes. What I’ve done in the book is I’ve built it out even more. I’ve looked at those three root causes and said, “What needs to happen for that salesperson to strengthen their internal stories and elevate their connection? What needs to happen for that salesperson to tell the right stories, collaborate with the buyer, and deepen their conversations? What needs to happen for that salesperson to actually elicit the right stories so that they can accelerate their rate of conversion?” They are the nine-story modes. They are basically the core of SHIFT and DISRUPT.

Let’s unpack a little bit of this. As I’m playing along and the folks at home will, when they buy this book, we take a look at what you identified as that beta blueprint. I know you had a background in neural linguistic programming and you were actually a coach for Tony Robbins at one point in time for a certain region of the world, and he’s very big on this as well. Let’s talk about those first stories or the stories that the salesperson tells themselves about the buyer.

There are three. You are right, I’ve got every piece of conceivable paper known to mankind and womankind.

By the way, they’re not in your office behind you.

No one has ever asked to see a copyright.

We’re going to have to do fact-checking on that after the fact. We’ve got a team who does that. It’s the same people who do research.

You did say that we are not theorists but practitioners. This is the whole thing. I look back over my self journey as well, and I think the realization hit me once I started to dig a little deeper and take my learning to a level that was based on personal leadership. I bring together personal leadership. I’ve mentioned thought leadership and sales leadership so I bring those three attributes together. In the personal leadership component of it, I’d never drunk the Kool-Aid, but I was fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity to not just deepen my practical understanding by working with leaders around the world through that vehicle of coaching. I also spent eighteen months doing a diploma in all things coaching, so executive coaching, sales coaching, and business coaching.

That was in Australia and I did that separately. That was where the realization came in around being able to tap into communication at a deeper level and marry in psychology. That’s why I call the story selling circles, I shift and disrupt. The whole philosophy is pretty much based on five disciplines. It’s like a Swiss army knife. I’m bringing in disciplines of definitely story as a component. It’s very much mental models, but psychology neurolinguistics and what I refer to as a coach approach. I’m big on the fact that salespeople, when they can go to market and be able to coach their buyers rather than sell them.

Ultimately, we are there to make a sale but the vehicle to do it can shift. The three stories that fit under the internal stories, those first three that I have identified as being huge red flags, identity, how a sales professional or a sales leader views their identity, how do they show up, and are they congruent with their role. Quite often, there is this belief system that I don’t want to be perceived as a salesperson. If you are going to go into a conversation with a buyer and you have that as a belief, it’s going to play with your energy levels.

We hear this all the time. One of the core missions of our entire business is to align the concept or the verb of selling with exactly what you talked about, which is all we’re selling is helping the buyer achieve a better outcome. Selling is management consulting. The stereotype is 50 years old of selling is pedaling or cajoling, but that’s been wrong for 25 years. It’s 50 years old, but it’s been completely wrong for anybody who sold anything material in the last 25 years.

Yes, I understand the concept of serving the buyer and helping the buyer. That is our role.

It’s educating the buyer. It’s bringing the perspective of how they can run a better business with your solution or how they can run a better business with insight and knowledge.

I agree with that. There is also another component to this in my thinking. It’s all good and well. We are there to serve, to help, and all the rest of it, but we’re also there to help ourselves. This has got to be to serve the buyer and our company. It’s got to be a win-win. If you go in purely with some salespeople, with this whole servant leadership approach, or “I’m there to serve,” that may actually tap into money beliefs. Also, that may impact the ability for a salesperson to not hold margin if we are there to help them and we are being told by the buyer that, “You’re too expensive.” It may be that that salesperson defaults to discounting. It’s little nuances like that.

Serve the buyer and serve the company. It needs to be a win-win.

I do think they’re different things. We’re no different than a management consultant is in to help a client. Helping a client doesn’t mean making sure we do it at a loss or affecting margin and discount, but the reality of it is if I’m taking the right approach as a salesperson to focus on helping them, things like pricing and discounts don’t matter.

I also believe that there’s another thought process I have, which I’ve always believed in. We are playing the long game. There’s a sense of urgency. We mustn’t lose that sense of urgency. In the big scheme of things, we are playing the long game if we are to truly be that respected industry resource. I’m with you there. Identity is definitely part of it. Authority is a second-story mode that we delve into. Money is the third. They are the three key areas that I see that sales professionals probably sabotage themselves the most as far as those internal stories they’re telling themselves about the buyer or the deal

.

We mustn't lose our sense of urgency. But in the big scheme of things, we are playing the long game.

While we’re on that, before we go to the stories that we tell the buyers and the stories we elicit from the buyers, I love that part. If somebody is tuning in to this, what might be a tip or two that they can start to think about in addition to reading the book that might help in those areas? You said you’re seeing some salespeople sabotage themselves. What are some of the things you’re seeing or some of the things that our audience could maybe focus on in this category?

If I was with a salesperson now and we were having this conversation, I would go into coach mode. I would ask them to consider a couple of things. I wouldn’t necessarily tell them to do anything because you know that your audience at the moment, I would rather them contemplate a couple of thoughts. I would rather them think. The question would be, “How are you showing up in front of your buyer?”

Let’s get honest, what part of you needs to be expanded? There would be a part of you that has a belief about your role as a salesperson. Does that need to be expanded? Is there a part of you that resists prospecting? Is there a part of you that pushes back on holding margin? What is that part? How can that part maybe be reduced? There’s an exercise in the book that I’ll get people to go through, but it is looking at the different parts of us. We are almost schizophrenics. We’re made up of multiple parts.

It’s not just me.

No. I used to think it was just me, by the way. I would get them to answer themselves or think about that. Secondly, I would ask them to think about their beliefs around people in authority.

Tell us more about that.

If you were driving along the highway and you looked at your rear vision mirror and you heard a police car with lights flashing, what would you do?

Pull-over because it’s the police. I’d pull over because I’m assuming they’re coming after me.

It’s like, “What have I done wrong?” you’re pumping the brakes, looking at the seatbelt, and they just speed right past you. What is it about the fact that because they were police? We’ve grown up in an environment where we have to respect authority, whether it’s the teacher, the priest, or the police. You then grow up and there’s CEO written on a door. It doesn’t matter if that person is younger than you or not.

Nearly 25% of people have a fear of authority. You roll that out across the sales profession and we start to marry together the identity that some salespeople have that may not help them or serve them as much. Marry that with a fear of authority, and then add into that money beliefs. I think $100 is a lot of money, but I’m selling something for $100,000. How is that going to impact my ability to have those financial conversations? They are the three-story modes that I address so far as the internal stories that salespeople tell themselves. Not just salespeople, but business owners and sales leaders.

Let’s move on to the stories we tell buyers. What are the story modes we need to think of there?

There are a couple of different avenues to go here. 1) We mentioned traditional storytelling where you have your origin story, your signature story, or your connection story. It follows the hero’s journey, and there’s a method in its madness. A case study is different than a success story. A case study is all about you couched around a buyer. A success story is all about the buyer. We know that that is an important part of selling. That’s something that we also address. What I’ve done is I’ve taken it a step further and I’ve thought, “I want this book to shift and disrupt the way a salesperson thinks about telling stories.” When we think that 83% of our processing is done visually and 11% of our process is done auditorly, why don’t we try to capture a story visually?

This is thought leadership coming into it now. The ability for you to be sitting over a coffee with a prospect, listening, eliciting their stories, being able to capture, know how to capture, so this is very much a playbook as well, their story, and grab your pen and napkin. You hear that cliché all the time. “Grab a napkin and do a deal.”

We did a deal back at the napkin.

How can you do that and be able to capture and collaborate on what you are hearing? When you draw something, you are actually drawing someone in. When we think about the fact that as children, our first attempt at art was shapes, triangles, squares, and circles. Why would we not lean into that part of us as well and be able to collaborate? Charlie Munger says that you’ve got to be able to capture your ideas on a framework of mental models. What a mental model does, and we are talking here about a ladder, a 2x2 matrix, or a Venn diagram, is it helps decision-making. It simplifies the complex and it paints a picture. There’s a saying, “A picture paints a thousand words.” What I’ve done in the book, the three modes there are based around progression, tension, and integration. Let me break those down.

Progression. Every one of us wants to progress. We want growth whether it’s personal growth, professional or business growth, or whatever it may be. We’ve all seen Maslow’s hierarchy. We’ve all seen Dr. Clare Graves’ Spiral Dynamic. They are examples of progression models. When you are able, you would pre-bake these so you would do your research and you would build these out beforehand because you know your target market. If you are wrong, it doesn’t matter because it’s an opportunity for discussion. You don’t have to do all three of these. You may choose to create a ladder or an aspirational hierarchical model and discuss the growth path for your buyer or for their business. Also, a ladder like Maslow’s hierarchy will always give us why change is important. That’s the why.

The second one, which is all around tension is how do we build intensity into the sales conversation. We want our buyers to be sitting on the edge of their seat. We want them to be thinking, “What do I need to do?” If we look at any 2x2 matrix, the Eisenhower Matrix, time management, and Robert Kiyosaki’s, the labels or the quadrants have tension.

We want our buyers to be sitting on the edge of their seat. We want them to be thinking, “Okay, what do I need to do?”

We want to be able to build intensity into our sales conversations by telling and collaborating a story. A 2x2 is always a what. What do I need to do? When you get to that final top right-hand quadrant, it’s like, “That’s what I want.” In my conversion matrix in the book, it’s like, “I want to accelerate my team’s conversions. I want to build the conversions of my sales pipeline. How do I do that?” That naturally leads to a how.

A Venn diagram is always around how. A Venn diagram is all about how we integrate and how we articulate outcomes. What I’ve shared with you early on, the story selling circles, is my Venn diagram. I will sit with somebody and build it out with them because I’ve elicited their stories along the way. It’s a no-brainer. They then know, “You get me.” They are the three external stories that we tell our buyer using mental models.

You’ve got a well-identified ideal client profile and you focus as a business, you know what these are. Every time you have this conversation, you’re going to get better at it. You have more feedback and input because you’re learning every time you go through this. By the way, here’s something to double underline. Even if we’re slightly wrong with this point of view, it doesn’t matter. It’s this opportunity for discussion and engagement.

One of the tenets of true coaching is there is no right or wrong. When you can go to market with that whole belief system that, “It doesn’t matter what I put down. It doesn’t matter what I suggest. There’s no right or wrong. It’s simply my perception. The buyer will always have their own perception.” When you can collaborate, clarify, be on the same side of the table, and be comfortable and congruent in saying, “I might’ve got this wrong. Let’s talk about that.” You are going to get gold out of that because they are going to know that whole know, like, and trust component is off the charts.

It aligns with so much basic common sense. That’s where a lot of this heads. We’re in for a common sense revolution. Professional sales is coming.

I totally agree.

It leads to I’m not pitching anything except your wisdom. We have knowledge and insight where we’re going to teach them something different, perhaps they haven’t seen before or prompt that discussion. This is where you get your elevating that trust and credibility and all those kinds of good things. All of the walls drop when you’re in this conversation. It’s a different level.

It totally is. When you get it, you can play with it, you can try it on, and you’ll get blisters like a new pair of shoes, that’s okay. They will eventually become such a comfortable conversation. Another vehicle to get there is that third root cause. That is not being able to elicit their stories the correct way. Leaning into the coach approach is how you can elicit those essential stories. When you have this whole coach approach, they do all the talking because you know what you’re doing, you know the questions that you’re asking, and you know why you’re asking them. If we flip into those three-story modes, it’s about expansion, perspective, and decision.

We want to be able to build flexibility into our conversations which is, “How do we expand? What’s the expansion? How do we elicit the stories through showing that flexibility?” As a sales professional and a sales leader, we have to now even, more so than ever, to communicate with so many different levels within an organization. The choke-hold that I’m seeing with businesses out there is that we still talk about, “Don’t talk brochure talk.” You build in this fear of authority and all of this other stuff. You’re finding salespeople will take the path of least resistance, which is going to the level that they’re comfortable talking to.

What are those conversations we have that enable us to move between C-level contextual conversations, operational conceptual conversations, and user-based content conversations? It’s bringing in this flexibility. The person who is able to have the conversation with every level will own the business. I teach how to do that.

It’s great the way you’ve simplified this approach. It’s very much clean set of eyes on some things that have been age-old prophecies as you point out in the book. I think you quote Aristotle about communication. The last point you referenced when you’re dealing with different people in the organization and they have dramatically different personal and professional needs and wants. That goes back to the wonderful days when I had hair in 1991 with strategic selling, frankly. I think it’s actually earlier. It was even fifteen years before me. It was like the ‘80s. That’s where they came up with the buyers. That has not changed in 40 or 50 years. The fact that we have to understand the different folks involved.

There’s a lot of talk now about the buying groups increased. No, it hasn’t, for anything material. If you were selling a widget for $50 or $5,000, maybe there was one person. If you were doing an enterprise software deal or a large outsourcing deal, there were fifteen people involved in that. It was always multiple buyers for anything material. They always had difficulty coming to consensus. You were trying to provide thought leadership and guidance. The main difference would be they did have to take some of their information from you at phase value because they didn’t have access to the global encyclopedia of everything that’s happened up until 2021 through ChatGPT.

Yes, exactly. Even out there at the moment, within enterprise sales organizations, there are still territories that don’t necessarily sell to enterprise. That may be the component of that particular global company or a big company, but the sales team may still be selling to SMB. They still do have that one point of contact. It could be that the salesperson is dealing with the CEO of an SMB, but they’re still talking at the user level. It can be, “My salesperson who only has legal firms or small family manufacturing company, how can I take that particular salesperson and up their ability to be able to have a C-level conversation with that one particular buyer?” It goes across both enterprise sales, where you do have multiple stakeholders and the SMB space as well.

I’m trying to connect some dots and this would be opinion, not fact because I love your research-based approach to this and it certainly aligns with our approach in the funnel. One of the things we are noticing is the increase in mental health issues with professional salespeople. Generally, they’re not happy. One of the things you’ve talked about here is many professional salespeople have this comfort level dealing at certain very tactical levels like users.

For you or me selling to a user is actually at times unpleasant because they’re sitting, they’re used to a demo, they can’t say yes, they can only say no, they’re not strategic, they’re trying to get through every day and maybe worry about what went wrong yesterday. If salespeople want to default to only doing that, then they default to pitching because they’re not getting strategic conversations from typical users. This whole thing is no fun.

My mind is going from a couple of different directions here because I’m thinking, “How do they elevate their connection and make contact?” You think about email as completely spam. A voicemail is an unknown number. LinkedIn is completely spam. There are apps and stuff that you can short-circuit. How do you make contact? That is the frustrating part for all of us. You get a lot of gurus out there talking about the prospecting but they’re not doing it anyway.

How do we make contact with the right person to start with? That’s a question and it comes back to the old days when it was direct mail. Is networking making a comeback? There are all of these different avenues, but that salesperson who’s stuck with the user, their hands are tied for a couple of reasons. Their leadership team won’t bring people in to elevate the learning because in some instances, that leader doesn’t want to be show up for not knowing what to do. It’s a catch-22. I’m with you there. The salespeople need support internally and it’s got to come from all levels. It’s got to be a conversation that has to be had.

We have this conversation on this show that is great, by the way. You and I are going to talk for two hours offline from this show. How do you do that now? Our belief is the automated and the spam is garbage. It’s wasting everybody’s time. There was a time you and I will remember when you and I got 30 voicemails a day. We had days and times when our voicemail could fill out even if we were working. Now, I get 2 or 3 voicemails a day.

If you want to reach me, first of all, it’s got to be a multi-channel approach, but call me. Secondly, do ten minutes of research on me, my business, and my industry. I’m listed as the CEO of In The Funnel. Whether that’s the right or wrong thing, I am. We do get hit 30 times a week. At least five times a week, we get hit by a sales training company that says, “Do you want to improve the way your sales team is selling?” We are a sales training team. If anybody had ever gone to our website, they’d go to a video that tells them how to do demand generation.

We talk about this and all they’d have to do in a voicemail to me and say, “Let me see if your In The Funnel practices work. I noticed that you’ve got three levels of social media. We help with the fourth. This is an opportunity. I love the video you put on YouTube talking about A, B, and C.” I am morally and ethically compelled to respond to that voicemail. It’s so painfully easy. What’s happening in professional sales now is what we want to do is say, “I made 100 calls and I didn’t get any live conversations. Why don’t I try and email blast 300 people tomorrow and we keep doing more of what’s not working?”

We just keep doing more of what's not working.

That’s what I’m saying. Somebody is leading that practice.

The other point you bring on, and I have a lot of empathy for them, you talked about sales leaders aren’t feeling comfortable to bring in somebody from the outside world to coach their team. Folks who tune in to our show have heard me rant on this many a time. The best performers in the world have multiple coaches. The top performers of the world or most successful entrepreneurs in the world are part of either Strategic Coach, Gazelles, or EOS. The best athletes in the world have nine coaches.

It comes back to ego and identity. Everything swings back to the internal stories. It’s a complete circle. I’m going off on a different tangent here. It’s like as I’m going back to that final circle, I talked about building and showing flexibility where we were talking about the CEO. The next story mode, which dovetails into what we were talking about then is based on perspective. That is all about, “How do we identify criteria?” We know the cliché. We all buy unlogged emotion and we back it up with logic. We need a bit of logic before it goes into the emotional, and then it swings back to logic again.

This is using the coach approach. Being able to identify is being able to go from the shallow. If you do picture the iceberg, most salespeople and sales leaders are playing in the shallows. They’re understanding outcomes. Everybody understands outcomes and what a buyer or a sales team member needs. What is it that they don’t want? That’s another question to ask. As you go deeper under the iceberg, being able to elicit those states that are at the value of that particular buyer, their business, or your sales team.

What is important to that salesperson or what is important to that buyer at a personal level? Also, understanding what comes next further under the iceberg is, if growth or profitability is important to your buyer or if support is important to your team member or salesperson, what must have to happen in their eyes to achieve that? We all make assumptions and we think, “Someone says they want support.” “Every Monday morning, come in and have a meeting with me and I’ll go.” “The buyer wants profitability.” “We’ll do X, Y, and Z.” That’s not what they mean. We have to identify the criteria further.

The final story mode is decision. That is, land the business. When we think about decision, it’s all about, “Who makes the decision? Who else apart from yourself? When is a decision going to be made? What’s the process for the decision?” That’s all external. We need to tap into the decision drivers of our buyer. That is at a deeper level as well. Once you identify what those drivers are, then your conversation shifts again. The same applies for the sales leader with the team.

It’s so important. Frankly, if you’ve been doing this a while, it’s so obvious, but it’s not being done. I think there’s multiple reasons for it, but any sales leader tuning in to this show, in the next time you’re having a collaborative discussion with one of your teammates on a deal status and an update, deal strategy, when you say, “Tell me what’s important to this person.” Your salesperson’s response says, “Obviously, they want to do this and this. It’s not obvious unless the buyer told me it. It’s not my assumption.” What did they specifically say and why?

That’s the stories we’ve got to elicit. They are the stories that are so often missed. It’s like having a three-legged stool here. The stool has only got two legs or the stool has only got one. The third leg is what’s missing as well. That’s going to make a rock-solid deal.

One of the things we’ve found, and maybe you can confirm from your perspective, we see many salespeople are afraid to ask that question about what might get in the way of moving forward or what are you worried about. It’s because they think that if I ask the question, I’m going to give the buyer a reason not to move forward. When the reality of it is in this day and age, that buyer has got fifteen reasons for not moving forward that is literally keeping them awake at night. Why not have a conversation about that?

You mentioned Jeb Blount earlier. I spoke at OutBound Conference. I put this up on the main stage screen and used it as an example. When a buyer does give us old term or an objection, I don’t like that word, they’re sharing some concerns with us. What we do instinctively is we justify. Immediately, we go into justification mode. We try to sell. What we need to do is we need to elicit the story behind that consumer. It’s like, “We are a little bit too expensive or our delivery is not on point.” What has happened to make you think that way? That’s giving us data and it’s giving us the story behind the story. Now we can acknowledge that and we can respond with a story of another client who had a similar thought process. It expands the conversation. It’s collaborative, and then we could move on.

You’re absolutely right. However we term it, we need to understand it and that’s part of the collaboration. In fact, for those of us who used to do material deals or very significant deals, one of the things that would happen from a client’s side would be both parties would be working from one business case. At that level of deal went to a multi-hundred million dollar deal. There’s no our perspective in your perspective. There’s our collective perspective. Let’s agree on what we all think is going to happen. That’s what you’re going to use to take up the channel and so forth. Once we’re aligned and we agree, then we negotiate, “How do we split the value?” They’re not afraid to do what’s right for their business, and then I have to be comfortable doing what’s right for my business.

We’re at least aligned on what we believe the facts are. These things are difficult to come to the end game but then we’re having this real conversation about the important points. We’re not coming from two different places. In that way, we know what happens if we get to an impasse and we have this real decision to make. People aren’t going quiet on you. They don’t stop returning calls. They don’t give you a pretend reason or the political reason they didn’t move forward. They actually tell the truth. I’m not prepared to jeopardize, “We’re doing this over here.” I’m not prepared to jeopardize that with this new initiative. It’s going to take some of the same IT resources and some of the same business resources. I don’t think I’ve got the capacity to do it.

That comes back to the risk factor has nothing to do with before signing the order. It’s what happens after the order is signed. That’s where the risk factor is. In the book, I talk about the cost of inaction, the cost of the problem, and all these different costs because that has to come into the conversation as well. That’s way back in the beginning as part of your collaborative understanding. We talked discovery but it is that professional conversation that is business. It’s a business conversation.

All of these conversations are far more fun than pitching a product to a user, and then hoping that user somehow can magically sell your product because you couldn’t. Now you’re hoping they can take it up. Bernadette, I have to be very cautious of your time. I can’t believe the amount of time we’ve spent talking and how fast this has gone for me. What an absolute pleasure speaking with you. Personally, I’ve received enormous value from this conversation. I am darn sure that the people tuning in to this show have as well. First of all, thank you so much for joining.

My pleasure. It’s been fun.

If people want to learn more about you, which they inevitably will, what’s the best way to do so?

Please join me on LinkedIn and mention that you heard me on the show. That would be awesome for Mark as well. My book SHIFT and DISRUPT, it’s on Amazon now. If you are a sales leader and you have a team, go to ShiftAndDisrupt.com because there are bonuses there for sales leaders. I’m also running a webinar, so if you’re on LinkedIn with me, you’ll see the webinar coming up where I’ll be running through this. Those are a few channels.

Please make sure we’re on the list of invitees for that webinar. We’re going to share that with our network as well. They’re going to get lots of value from that.

Thank you.

When you’re thinking about your next keynotes, you’re probably planning for next year in the not-too-distant future, please check out Bernadette’s website because she’s done keynotes for some of the top organizations in the world. Some of the top thought leaders in sales have actually engaged Bernadette to come and do those keynotes. Thank you so much, Bernadette.

My pleasure. It’s been awesome.

Sure has. Thank you, team, for joining. As always, we run the show to try and elevate the performance and professionalism of B2B sales. In doing so, we want to improve the lives of professional salespeople. We hope that you’ve enjoyed this show. If you do, by the way, please like and subscribe to the show because that’s helpful to us. Thank you for that. If there are ways that we can improve this show, I’d love to hear your ideas. My email is MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. That’s my personal email that I check. If you give us some constructive criticism, I am personally going to respond to that email. We love constructive criticism. The more direct, the better. It’s faster. We love it. Thank you for doing that. We’ll see everybody next time.

Important Links

• Bernadette McClelland

• SHIFT and DISRUPT: Stop Selling Widgets. Start Selling Wisdom

• When You Are Going Through Hell, Keep On Going

• The Art of Commercial Conversations

• The First Sale is ALWAYS to Yourself

• 25 Ways NOT To Lose Your Next Sale!

• SMASH Through Your Sales Barrier!

• Thought Leaders Global

• Building a StoryBrand

• LinkedIn – Bernadette McClelland

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

About Bernadette McClelland

Bernadette McClelland: CEO – Sales Leaders Global LLC and Influential Speaker on Disruption and Business Growth

Australian, Female, Pragmatic, Inspirational, Compelling, Real!

Bernadette McClelland is a foremost expert in Sales Leadership and Transformation Strategy. With a dynamic career that encompasses an executive role in Corporate Australia, entrepreneurial ventures, and business ownership, she is a beacon in this new Wisdom Economy. Internationally acclaimed, she's viewed as in the top 1% of sales leaders globally by the US Government, among the Top 50 global speakers and honored as one of the Top 35 Most Influential Women in Sales.

Her accolades include coaching Harvard MBA students, mentor for Colorado’s Global Landing Pad, partnerships with industry luminaries like Anthony Robbins, and endorsements from renowned author Brian Tracey. With a legacy that spans from New York City to New Delhi, Bernadette's profound insights and practical strategies offer franchise owners and sales leaders an unmatched perspective for thriving in today's business landscape.

Personal Disruption With Whitney Johnson

Ever wonder why somebody completely disrupts themselves or changes direction even if they were successful in what they'd previously been doing? We see that happen everywhere from sports to entertainment to the world of business. This phenomenon of “personal disruption” is the specialty of Whitney Johnson, CEO of the Human Capital Consultancy Disruption Advisors. Having worked with Clay Christiansen, Whitney took his concept of product disruption and applied it to people. In this episode, you’re going to learn how we can actually disrupt ourselves and what that experience looks like for the individual. In the constantly evolving professional sales space, we need to be constantly changing and developing, so this conversation is deeply relevant to our space. Tune in!

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Personal Disruption With Whitney Johnson

Do you ever wonder why somebody completely disrupts themselves or changes direction even if they were successful in what they'd previously been doing? You think of Michael Jordan, one of the best basketball players in the entire world, who retires from the game, and three years later, he is playing baseball in the minor leagues, traveling on buses.

You might think of Lady Gaga, top of the pop charts. The next album she releases is a jazz album with Tony Bennett, where she's starting over again. Sometimes, we force ourselves to disrupt and change and sometimes, events will take place that cause us to disrupt where we are. We are going to learn a lot about that in this episode because our guest is Whitney Johnson and she's the CEO of the human capital consultancy Disruption Advisors.

Thinkers50 ranked Whitney among the top 50 management thinkers in the world in 2015, 2017, 2019, and 2020. She's also a top LinkedIn voice. Whitney is an award-winning author, world-class keynote speaker, and a frequent lecturer for the Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning Division. We are going to be talking to Whitney about her great book called Smart Growth.

The main topic here is personal disruption. We all know about product or market disruption. The Innovator's Dilemma was made famous by Clay Christensen. Whitney worked with Clay Christensen and what she does is she takes that concept of business disruption or product disruption, and she applies it to people. How do we disrupt ourselves and what causes that? Why would we do that? Is it an external factor or an internal factor? What are we going through when that happens?

Interesting conversation with Whitney. One of the things that's so interesting for those of us in professional sales is we do need to be constantly changing, evolving, and developing. Some of the thoughts and concepts in Whitney's book and this conversation will help us with that. I enjoyed speaking with Whitney. I hope you enjoy this episode. If you do, please like and subscribe to the show because that matters to us, and thank you for doing so. Here's Whitney Johnson.

Whitney, thank you so much for joining the show. It's such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Thank you for having me.

We always like to throw the floor over and ask somebody for a short version of their professional journey. Given what you have done, it's such a super interesting story. Tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are.

In my professional journey, I majored in music in college and I studied piano. When I graduated, I got married in college, which is pretty unusual, but I moved to New York with my husband. He was getting his PhD at Columbia, and we needed to put food on the table, so I was the designated breadwinner. I went out and interviewed for a job and discovered Wall Street. As I was a music major and because I was a female, and this was the late '80s, I started as a secretary working for a stockbroker.

I would go to work every day and see all of these young, aspiring stockbrokers, aspiring masters of the universe, saying things like, “Throw down your pom-poms and get in the game.” At first, I was offended because I was a cheerleader in high school. The more I listened to them, I realized that I needed to throw down my pom-poms.

I started taking business courses at night, accounting, finance, and economics, and that was the beginning of me disrupting myself and disrupting what I thought was possible. Especially because I had a boss who believed in me and it allowed me to move from being a secretary to an investment banker. I did investment banking for several years and then got disrupted again because my boss got fired, and they probably would have fired me, too, except that I had a good performance review and I was pregnant. That was helpful and so they moved me, but more like shoved me into equity research. I went from being a banker to doing equity research.

It turns out that became a career maker for me. I was very good at making stock calls and building these financial models. This disruption turned out to be very much a slingshot forward for me. I did that for about eight years. I became an institutional investor-ranked analyst. In my parlance, I was at the top of my S-curve and wanted to do something different.

I went to my boss. I said, “We'd like you right where you are.” I'd now read The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. I thought, “Disruption might not be about products and services, but also about people,” and so I disrupted myself and thought I was leaving Wall Street forever to become an entrepreneur. It turns out I did that for a couple of years and then connected with Clay Christensen.

I was doing some nonprofit work with him through our church, and he wanted to start a fund to invest in disruptive innovation. I joined him and his oldest son, Matt, and we launched the Disruptive Innovation Fund. I did that for 5 or 6 years. There was this thread of we were using the S-curve to invest and I thought, “The S-curve applies to people, not just the product,” so you are sensing a theme.

I had an article in the Harvard Business Review called Disrupt Yourself. In 2012, I moved into this brand new world of thought leadership, and over the last several years, I have been building a business and now have a co-founder and partner, Amy Humble. It's called Disruption Advisors. We are all about helping you grow your people so that you can grow your business and we have an assessment tool that we use. We do coaching, keynotes, and workshops. Now, I'm very much in the business in many ways back to where I began, but I'm not now about the momentum of stocks. I'm about the momentum of people. That is my career journey in a few minutes.

You have taught me that I have to work on my introductions. That is fed but the most precise and interesting explanation and there are so many things to unpack. We are going to be talking about disrupting yourself. We are going to be talking about the S-curve, but I have got to throw it out and ask, you are on Wall Street in investment banking in the '80s. The egos in that building must have been shocking, and then it doesn't even matter what building you were in.

It's the late '80s, early '90s. If you saw the movie Working Girl, I was the working girl. Even big hair and all and this was the era of Liar's Poker and The Bonfire of the Vanities. I don't know that I saw the big ego piece. I thought it was exciting. I had grown up on the West Coast, and there wasn't Silicon Valley at this point. New York was the epicenter of financial services. I suppose there were big egos, but mostly, it was exciting.

What a wonderful journey. Very quickly Music Major. Did you have an ARCT and piano? Is that what you did at university? Tell us a little bit about the level of your piano studies.

I don't know what an ARCT is. Maybe that's a Canadian thing, but I do have a  Bachelor of Arts in Music, and my emphasis was in Piano, and then I minored in English. I was a classically trained pianist. I discovered a little bit of jazz along the way. I never got as good as I would like to be in jazz, but that was my emphasis. One of my pinnacle achievements was I did a senior recital when I was a senior right before I graduated. That was a great accomplishment. I also got to play in our university jazz band and we performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival. It was pretty fun.

Maybe it is. The Royal Conservatory of Music is here in Canada. I also went through musical training when I was younger, and then you'd go up the ranks of the conservatory, and the accreditation was in front of a board from the conservatory. The ARCT would have been the pinnacle. Believe me. I got nowhere near it.

What do you play? What instrument?

Now I play drums, but I was playing piano then and writing musical theory as a young child. As soon as I was allowed to make a few of my own decisions when I was 14, 15, and 16, I stepped on a drum set from playing piano. No more piano. It was cooler. Being the innovator at the time, I thought being in a band would be a nice way of looking cool in front of girls. It turns out even that didn't work for me, but in theory, it was a good strategy. It was poorly executed.

A young fellow has joined a band in hopes of attracting the opposite sex.

It's the only reason you do it. It ended up paying dividends for me years later because, although she won't admit it, my beautiful wife, Donna. When we first started dating, I was on the tail end of playing in bar bands while I was starting my full-time career. I don't think it hurt because I wasn't the coolest dude, but maybe it didn't hurt that I was in those bands.

She saw you behind that drum set. I can see that. That's fantastic.

I needed all the help I could get. Let's talk about such an amazing journey and connecting. We have all heard of Clay Christensen and The Innovator's Dilemma. I love this idea of saying that innovation and progression, that innovation isn't product-centric. It's people-centric. Let's talk a little bit about disrupting yourself. This came to fruit in 2012 with one of what seems like a gazillion articles you have written for Harvard Business Review, but tell us about the concept of disrupting yourself.

To give a quick primer. Disruptive innovation is a term of art that was coined by Clay Christensen. The idea is it's a silly little thing that takes over the world. The telephone did to the telegraph. The automobile did to the horse and buggy. Netflix has done the Blockbuster and now cable TV. For me, in the emerging markets, it was the wireless was disrupting wireline.

That's what it looks like for a product or a service. The insight that I had is that companies don't disrupt. It's the people that disrupt. What does personal disruption look like? It's where you are willing to become a silly little thing to take over the world. The big difference with personal disruption is that you are the Netflix and the Blockbuster. You are the telephone and you are the telegraph because you are disrupting you.

A high-level example is if you are thinking, “What do you mean? How do you picture this?” Lady Gaga is a great example of personal disruption because in 2008 she goes straight to the top of the charts and she doesn't stay there. For an encore, she decides to go to the bottom of a new chart. She collaborates with Tony Bennett on a jazz album. She then does a Sound of Music tribute, so musical theater at the Oscars, and then she collaborates or produces a country album. She gets to the top of a curve, and then she decides to disrupt herself to become a silly little thing.

The reason that we do personal disruption, if you go back to the theory of disruptive innovation, is that when you are willing to play where you haven't played before, your odds of success are 6 times higher, and your revenue opportunity 20 times greater. That was the theory. That was the PhD dissertation that Clay wrote about in The Innovator's Dilemma, but if you want to extrapolate from that, for us as individuals, it's also going to be true if we are willing to take on the market versus competitive risk if we are willing to create something rather than compete with what is.

When you are willing to play where you haven't played before, your odds of success are six times higher and your revenue opportunity 20 times greater.

Can we go through those numbers again? If you are willing to take on that risk, tell us about those two metrics that you shared that he put in his dissertation.

What he found is he analyzed a whole array of companies. I'm fuzzy on the actual details, but here's the top line. He analyzes these companies. He looks at which ones are still in existence several years later, a decade later, versus the ones that weren't. What he found is that the ones that were creating new markets, the ones that were taking on market risk rather than competing with the incumbents, were six times more likely to succeed.

It was only 6% to 36%. There was still a 74% or 64% chance that they weren't going to survive, but 6 times greater. That's a lot. Those odds were not only better, but the revenue opportunity, again, when they were willing to go after and create new markets and new value chains, their revenue opportunity was twenty times greater.

It's 6 times more likely to succeed, and the revenue opportunity is 20 times greater. Extrapolating for us as individuals, when we are willing to take on market risk, we are more likely to succeed because we are not competing with what is. Think about your show. If you try to go do something that someone else is doing, then it's going to be a lot harder to succeed. You create something new and uniquely yours.

That's the idea of personal disruption and bringing it back to an organization. When we, inside our organizations, are thinking about how do we create and how do we take on market risk? How do we play where no one else is playing? I can bring that back to my Wall Street career if you want me to, but how do we play where no one else is playing? If we do that, our odds of success are going to be significantly higher, and we are going to create markets not only for ourselves but for our organizations.

Thank you for that clarity. When we start to hear about this as an individual, we are talking about personal disruption. First, off the bat, it starts to feel or potentially sound a little frightening or scary. “I'm going to be jumping outside my comfort zone. I'm going to be taking on something new. I'm going to be going from the top of the charts to the bottom of the charts in the country, as per Lady Gaga.” Are we hardwired for this type of change generally as human beings? Is this something that's naturally in our DNA or is this something that there's got to be an event that causes us to want to go down this path?

The answer is yes and no. When you think about moving to the top of an S-curve and this S-curve of learning is something that helps us think about what growth looks like. When you get to the top, you are sitting on top of the mountain, you have a dilemma. This is the innovator's dilemma, but in this case, it's our dilemma.

On the one hand, we like being on top of the mountain. It feels good to be the master of all we serve. You have accomplished what we have accomplished. We are at the top of the leaderboard, except that there is something inside of us and there's this deep human longing, urge, and yearning where when we are at the top of the mountain, we are not getting any dopamine, which is a chemical messenger of delight. For us to continue to get dopamine, it requires that we do something new.

That new can be something productive and can be something counterproductive, like sabotaging our peers because we are bored. We now have this dilemma of what am I going to do? Oftentimes, because it is so comfortable to be there and because we are more motivated by what we lose than by what we gain, we can stay there, but that plateau becomes a precipice.

It's always better to disrupt yourself, but frequently in life, we have all had this experience where we get disrupted. Whether or not we disrupt ourselves or whether or not we get disrupted, we are still starting over, and we get this opportunity because now we are going to have the opportunity to get dopamine to grow. A very opening sentence of my book, Smart Growth, is that growth is our default setting. We all want to grow. Sometimes, we help ourselves to grow and sometimes, the universe gives us a little bit of a nudge.

Growth is our default setting. We all want to grow. Sometimes we help ourselves to grow and sometimes the universe gives us a little bit of a nudge.

You start to think about the leaders reading this show and say, “We all have it in our DNA to grow.” They are going to give us feedback that says, “Maybe I have got some members on my team where it doesn't appear like they are growth-oriented.” You said, “Sometimes we disrupt ourselves and sometimes we get disrupted.” How do we help those people with love, caring, and so on to disrupt themselves?

Can it be something where we drive that? Does it have to come internally? I will say that it seems like the best example of something disrupting all of us was the pandemic. Right off the bat, for years and years, we came across hundreds of thousands of folks, if not millions, who said, “I can't learn new technologies.” Suddenly, everybody and their brother is fantastic at video conferencing and managing remote meetings immediately overnight. Weeks later, maybe it was the S-curve, but they are on a huge growth curve in terms of trying to interact with people differently, leverage technology differently, and manage their lives differently. Is that a reasonable example of the outside world forcing us to disrupt ourselves?

It's a terrific example because every single one of us is on this S-curve. It's an S-curve of learning where you have got the launch point, the sweet spot in mastery, and you can draw this S. I would argue that pre-pandemic, we were all at the top of an S-curve. It may have been an S-curve we liked. It may have been an S-curve we didn't like, but it was comfortable nonetheless.

What happened with the pandemic pushed all of us off the curve at the same time, which is part of why emotionally and psychologically was so challenging because there wasn't anybody else who was at the top of the curve to pull us along. We are all at the launch point together. What that meant is that whether we wanted to change or not, we now had been thrown into a sea of change and we got to make a decision.

That, in many ways, was a gift because many of us who had gotten potentially a little bit flaccid with that muscle of disrupting ourselves from doing new things, we now had the opportunity to strengthen that muscle. For many of us, that was a huge gift, which is why, as I think about the next several years, there's going to be so much growth that's going to take place because we all strengthen that muscle, that ability to disrupt ourselves. There were many difficult things about the pandemic, but one of those gifts was that it strengthened our ability to disrupt ourselves. We got better at it because the older we get, the more we can insulate ourselves from never doing anything new, which requires us to do something new.

Is that why you referenced in another HBR article where everybody talked about the Great Resignation? I think that term is a misnomer. We are talking about the Great Aspiration because people have leveraged this event to start thinking about what they want to do. Maybe acknowledging that they can change and they can evolve and things are going to be different moving forward.

I continue to stand behind that is that we were looking at it and saying. Everybody is resigning. When you think about resignation, that's like, “I'm resigned too and I'm going to give up.” Some people do give up whenever there's something difficult. There are going to be people who are going to give up. In general, what we saw were people rallying and saying, “I did this hard thing. I can do hard things, whatever it was.”

Now, when we come out of the pandemic, if someone wants me to go back and do the same thing that I was doing before, I'm like, “No,” because I can do hard things. I have realized that I'm capable and so I want to do more. If we as a leader recognize that in our people, we will harness that and know that they want to grow and develop. If we give people an opportunity to do that, we will not only be able to hire people, but we will be able to retain them because we are going to give them an opportunity to grow.

What a joy when someone hasn't had that, and then, for the first time, they understand, “I can learn. I can develop.” You point to the dopamine, but it's life-changing. It is life-altering. In a funny way, we see a lot of this in what we do, even with our limited sphere or limited line of sight within the funnel. Oftentimes, we get brought into, let's call it turnaround an underperforming sales organization or transition it to a better future. We get to do this with SaaS companies, but we also get to do this with lots of different other industries. Be it manufacturing or industrial services. I have noticed this over the last years when we will come into a manufacturing business. We will start to talk to their sales organization.

There will be an enormous amount of fear. If we can get them through that, where we take them through that chasm and teach them some new skills, they will trigger this life-changing event where people will realize where they have come from in 4, 6, or 8 months and it starts to dawn on them. They can learn anything they want.

It changes everything. I'm not sure where you align with Carol Dweck's work and growth mindset and fixed mindset, but it aligns. To see that in action and I have lived that personally as well. It’s life-altering when you start to say, “Hard work will get me through anything. I will figure this out. It's going to be uncomfortable at times.” It's always uncomfortable at times, but we are going to get there, and then what's the next thing? Then it becomes a matter of saying, “The Great Aspiration.” What do you want to do?

A couple of thoughts are coming to mind. First of all, it must be thrilling for you to be able to be a part of that process and enjoy watching people unlock their potential. I want to acknowledge that. You mentioned Carol Dweck, and then I want to come back to that question of when people are in that place that they are not sure that they want to change.

As I think about Carol Dweck's work, I have quoted her in every book I have ever written. When you think about the S-curve, what it does is you have this growth mindset, but the S-curve of learning allows you to trace the emotional arc of growth. It allows you to say, “When I'm at the launch point, I'm going to feel overwhelmed. I'm going to feel excited, but I'm also going to be afraid, and this is normal. That means I will keep growing.”

It's going to tell me that when I'm in the sweet spot on that steep part of the curve, this is exhilarating. No problem growing here, but it's also going to tell me that when I'm in mastery, this place is where I have accomplished what I set out to accomplish. It tells me I'm a little bit bored and have done it. I need to do something new. I need more dopamine. I need to give myself a challenge so I can continue to grow. I think about the S-curve of learning as a way to operationalize or trace that emotional arc of growth that we experience when we have a growth mindset.

You asked me a question. This is important. I wanted to come back to it is, “What do I do? What do you do when you have got a sales leader who's like, ‘I'm good. My numbers are good.’” You are like, “You could be better.” The way that about it is that when you are at the top of a curve, and we have been talking about dopamine, that feelgood chemical, what that means is that you figure things out. You are good at what you are doing. You have got these thick neural pathways and these comfortable routines, but you are also a little bit bored. When you are bored, your plateau can become a precipice because you start saying things like, “I have dialed this in,” and you are not learning and not growing.

What I do and suggest, and you can do this with your people, is draw this figure and give them a way to say, “Here's where you are. You are at the top of the curve. Your brain needs dopamine because learning is the oxygen of human growth.” You need to learn. Importantly, because you have these thick neural pathways, you have the latent innovative capacity.

Learning is the oxygen of human growth.

This is easy for you. We want to unlock that. The way that we are going to unlock that is to invite you to do 1 or 2 new things, navigate some launch points, get some dopamine, and get your brain with oxygen so you can continue to learn because then you are going to go from being good to even better, or in the words of Jim Collins because my business partner worked with him, from good to great.

What great coaching. Those reading, we are always looking for these things strategies, processes, or tools so we can grab them from this show and apply them today, tomorrow, and the next day. There's no question. We have got folks on our teams who have a fixed mindset or are at the plateau of the S-curve.

I love that idea of saying, “Clearly, you are fantastic at this, but you need that next challenge to stay active, engaged, innovative, and physically feel better. You get the hit of dopamine. We are going to give you 1 or 2 things that are going to take you outside your comfort zone.” This is the thing we should all remember when we are in the uncomfortable launch of the S-curve because it's okay to see it on the curve. When you are in the middle of it, it doesn't always feel great.

It feels so horrible to feel like I don't know what I'm doing. We don't like it when we are 15, but people don't like it when they are 35, 55, 65, or 75. It feels so uncomfortable and that's part of why this S-curve is so useful because then you can say to people, “You are at the launch point. It is true that you may not be good at this, but right now, we don't have enough data to know that. All we know right now is you are doing something new and you are probably not very good at doing new things because you don't do it very often. I want you to stay with us.”

We had Seth Godin on the podcast and he said, “When you feel like an imposter, what do you want to say? You want to say good. There's something fulfilling in knowing that you might mess up.” That is so powerful. This is something I was thinking about if I can riff for a second. When you are selling, you are inviting the people that you are selling to be on the launch point of a new curve. It's uncomfortable for them, too. Your job in sales is to help them navigate that new launch point. Buying something from you, working with you, or whatever that looks like, they are scared, too. How do you make it so that they can feel safe doing something new, which is buying what you are selling them?

Is that the first time you came up with that?

Yes, it is.

That is pure genius. I was looking down team while Whitney was speaking because I was writing it all down. It's a complete genius. The challenge we have is we think sometimes, as salespeople, we don't even think of that S-curve. We want to pitch because we think people are already at the peak or they are already at the top, and we want them to move forward as long as they understand what we are doing.

We don't emotionally guide them through this journey, understanding there's risk involved. We don't think of it this way because it's so relevant that you may have heard of a book called The Challenger Sale by a couple of guys, Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson. Matt's latest book is something called The JOLT Effect, and what he's saying is, “Deals are going to no decision because your buyers are not making it through the S-curve.” They are launching, but you are not guiding them through it, and they are stopping. Too many companies are coming back saying, “I'd rather miss out than mess up.”

This is exactly the issue in professional sales. You and I need to write an article together for HBR on exactly this topic,n addition to the book Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company. It’s so smart. You have written other books. One is to build an A-team. As we go back to this concept of the S-curve, tell us that we are all naturally inclined to want to innovate, elevate, disrupt ourselves, and grow. How do I apply that when I'm trying to build my next team, whether it's executives or salespeople? How do I take some of those concepts and what are some of those tips for building that A-team?

We have talked about the S-curve as a way to think about personal growth. What you can then do is zoom out a little bit and you can use the S-curve to configure your team. The reason that you can do that is because people at different points along the curve have different strengths. People at the launch point of the curve have asked the question of why we do it like this.

They need training and yes, they are feeling uncomfortable, but they are also saying, why do we do it like this? Which can open the door to innovation. Whether it's people around products and it's around processes. You have people in this sweet spot who are still able to ask, “Why do we do it like this?” They are part of the way up the mountain, but they are not up. They also can execute because they have got some skills and training.

These are people who can both ask why but also answer. Then you have people who are in a master who can say, “Here's why we do it this way.” They are very much the people at the top. They have this perspective or the institutional and tribal memory. What we have used and would suggest you use as a starting point when configuring your team is to use the standard bell curve distribution and have 60% of your people in the sweet spot overall because everybody's going to have a portfolio of curves. They are not on one curve, but overall, they are in the sweet spot because they can ask and answer the questions. In the launch point, you want no more than 20% because they are able to ask, why do we do it like this? They also need training. They need support.

That can be a big tax on your people in the sweet spot in mastery, and then you don't want more than 20% of your people in mastery because, on the one hand, they are able to answer the questions of why do we do it like this? They have the institutional memory, but they are going to need a new curve. That new curve can be doing something and taking on a new role. It can be taking on a new project, but if you have got all your people and master, you are going to have a cliff.

You want 20% at the launch point, 60% in the sweet spot, and 20% in mastery. Now, depending on your team, depending on what your team is trying to accomplish, if you are a startup versus a storage company, and we have a whole bunch of detail on this in the interstitials of the book Smart Growth that may adjust. If you start with 20/60/20, that will allow you to start thinking, “How is my team configured? Am I optimized not only for innovation and growth but also for succession planning, and then you can use this for a talent development conversation.” That's how you can use it to build an A-team to zoom out a little bit and think about the configuration that way, that 20/60/20.

If I can, I will share a couple of challenges. A lot of folks reading the show or maybe dealing with it, and we can talk about how applying these concepts can help. One of the big challenges in professional sales, it's a unique field. If you are a Chief Revenue Officer, which I am, and as part of the In-the-funnel business model, you have the three most important and demanding stakeholders in the business.

You are reporting directly to clients. Ultimately, the most important bar is anyone. Secondly, I'm managing a sales team, which takes active time and effort management, and then finally, I'm reporting to my board or my executive team. Frankly, all three of those groups have very definitive black-and-white metrics by which they can measure my success.

Nobody else on the executive team has such a black-and-white scorecard of, “Are you doing a good job or not?” Also, I don't know the scorecards of everybody else on the executive team, but they know mine. “We are hitting our goals.” “We are not.” This interesting dynamic as a Chief Revenue Officer or VP of sales creates a bit of a pressure cooker.

What we have found in this pressure cooker is two things. One fact-based one. Gartner Group, McKinsey, and others will say, “The tenure of that person is eighteen months.” Think of that for a second. “The Chief Revenue Officer lasts eighteen months.” Who knows where they get on the S-curve for a new business when they take over?

They think they are in mastery. The other problem is they have to project they are in mastery because they are new in the business. They are trying to make an impact. They were brought in because something wasn't working. After all, nothing is ever working in sales. It's this interesting dynamic where my experience has been that individuals won't ask for help.

Sales is a performance art. If they are running a team of performance artists, they don't want to ask for help because it looks weak and they are new in their job. Yet the coaches of some of the best performance artists in the world have loads of help. I'm Canadian. The hockey team I love is the Toronto Maple Leafs. They have a head coach, fitness coach, speed coach, shooting coach, mindset coach, nutrition coach, and strength coach. They will bring in anybody who can help. One of the reasons we have this short tenure in sales leadership is they won't ask for help because they look weak. Maybe they think they are going to look weak if they do. Do you have any thoughts on how we might address that or help some of those people who are reading?

The challenge is that if you are good at what you do, you are getting brought in because you are a domain expert. We know you can sell. Then the question becomes and this builds on the whole conversation that we have been having as you come in new to this role, I know you can sell, but I need you to take a hot minute to figure out who you are selling to in this new role.

I need you to map the territory. Who are your clients? Who are your internal stakeholders? You need all these people internally to help you do this job, and you need the buy-in of the senior executives. What my recommendation would be is to say, “I'm on the launch point of a curve. I knew I only had eighteen months, but I probably have more time than that if I do this.” Start by saying, “I'm going to take a couple of months and I'm going to get to know everybody, but here's what I'm doing.” The challenge is that when you come into sales, you are going to only look at what they sell. You have got to give me another metric in place of that or in lieu of that.

For the first three months, I need you to not focus on this, or maybe it's a month because that will freak them out to do three months, but let's do a month. For the first month, the metric that I want you to measure me by is, “Did I talk to all of our stakeholders? Did I find out what they need?” I'm going to come back and report to you what I learned. That will be my metric for the first six weeks.

After we have done that, we have collected the data. We are at the launch point. We have explored. We have collected the data that we talked about in Smart Growth, and then I will come up with a plan for what we are going to sell, and you can measure me by that. If you bring everybody along in this process of, “Here's my hypothesis, and here's what we are going to learn. We are going to collect and build this together and get buy-in for the metrics by which you are going to be measured early on. That's going to allow you to have the runway that you need to be able to succeed.” It takes real humility and it's important because oftentimes people think that salespeople aren't humble.

That allows you to come in and be like, “Here's where we can go.” You are used to painting this future or on this vision of who and what we can be. That's the pixie dust. That's what's amazing about salespeople, but the initial part is the pixie dust. You have to know who your people are and what pixie dust they need.

What a fantastic answer on the spot. As everybody who reads this show can tell, when I host it, we don't prepare. We prepare for guests but don't prepare questions or anything of that nature. Whether you are a sales leader or a salesperson coming into that new role, the first thing is to say, “I may be at the mastery level in terms of core processes and guidelines for running a sales organization, but I'm at the launch point for running your sales organization with your clients, your industry, and your particular situation and niche.” The first thing I want to do, I'm going to get out there and I need to speak to 50 clients. I'm going to gather some data that's going to help me ramp up that curve and also interview internal stakeholders.

How interesting you landed on that answer. At the core, one of the reasons companies in the funnel exist is because so few sales leaders successfully go in and take over a new environment that after this happens 2 or 3 times, CEOs or boards come to us and go, “What are we supposed to do here?” Our answer is, “I don't know.”

We are in the mastery stage of running sales organizations, but it's the same thing. We don't know you. We don't know your business. We don't know your industry. We don't know your team. Let us come in and interview all of those people for 60 days, and then we will come back and tell you. It's almost our whole business model you came up with on the spot. Tell me a little bit about when we start to think of this S-curve and then I take a look at your vision about the Great Resignation being the great aspiration.

What can I do as a leader continually with those pressures? I have got to hit my numbers. I got to have a full team. We have got to compete and win in the marketplace, but I also want to take that time to develop my people because, for many leaders, that's where the true joy will come from and it pays dividends years from now. What would be some ideas or tactics for me to make sure that's front of mind as many of us are going into a brand new calendar year, this being January of 2023? Do you have any thoughts or ideas for the leaders and CEOs to leverage some of this learning?

For many leaders, true joy comes from developing their people.

The first thing that I would suggest is you look at your computer right now, your phone, and your calendar. Look at your list of things to do and ask yourself, “On my list of things to do, how many are tasks and how many are conversations with people? How many interactions with people? Are there any people conversations on there?” For most of us, like me, it's the task and there are no people. Now, you can keep your tasks, but make sure when you are in the conversation how you are thinking about people. The second thing that I would say is that these people's conversations don't take a ton of time.

I had one. I was on the road with a person on my team. I delivered a keynote at an insurance company. Afterward, this person on my team was having lunch and I started grilling her. Grilling her in the sense of, “Tell me what you care about. What do you like doing? What don't you like doing? Tell me about some personal goals that you have.”

For us, anyway, if we are not able to grow our people internally, then we are not authentic. If I'm telling you to grow your people and I am not growing the people on my team, then there is something seriously wrong, but I digress. Those conversations don't take a lot of time. We were together for half an hour talking about that and then, and it was very organic as part of the conversation.

Here's what I would say to you. If there are people on your team with whom you do not want to have that conversation, that is important data for you. It either means that you haven't done the work to get to know this person or maybe they are not the right person in that role. If you can't get invested enough to have that conversation, there's either something going on with you or there's something going on with them in that role and you need to figure out what that is fast because it's not fair to them, to you, and your organization.

I would look at my list and if I don't have any people on the list, I have a goal to have at least one people conversation a week. If you don't want to have a conversation with any people on your team, ask yourself why. Get curious because there's likely an action item there for you as well. Maybe you have to do some work and maybe they are not the right person in the role or need training, but there's something. There's data there, so make sure you mind for that data.

What a great canary and cold mind. You look at your actual week and there are some meetings you can't wait to walk into and there are other meetings you are not looking forward to. It's a good thing to take a pause and go why. It's funny that I tended to start to think about all of these things so much more when I became an entrepreneur because I felt like I had so much more freedom running in the funnel that I was only going to do things I wanted to do. When I was thinking in the corporate world, it felt like jail at times because there were so many things I didn't have to do, but in my waning years in the corporate world, I took the same approach anyway.

You always have much more control than you think you do.

You do. You have so much more control and you end up being so much better at what you do. The other thing that everybody reading this will resonate. There's so much joy in elevating the capabilities of your team. That wind in your sails is so important because when you feel great when that's happening, that then becomes contagious and you are passing it along and so on and so forth, and then they are building their team.

The truth is, I encourage anybody reading this, I agree with the Great Aspiration. Start with doing what you want to do, but know you can control your environment. You can make a positive impact on your environment. You are not a cog. You can influence what takes place in a positive way. You have to want to do it. You have to make it happen. The joy of this show and everybody knew I say this that I am a lifelong learner. I love learning and I love these conversations.

This conversation, both preparing for this conversation and then having it, has triggered so much for me. Next time I'm going to be doing a ridiculously deep dive into your career and what you have done in all of your books, not just Smart Growth. I'm sure the folks reading are going to want to do the same, but first I want to say thank you so much for joining. How do folks learn more about you? If everyone wants to go out and buy Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company, the title alone tells you why you want this book. In addition to that, how do people learn more about you?

You can go directly to our website, TheDisruptionAdvisors.com, which will give you lots of resources. As you said, in addition to the book, we also have a podcast. That will give you an opportunity to do a deeper dive into this material. Specifically, I would suggest podcast Episode 205, where we talk about an article that we wrote in Harvard Business Review titled Managing Your Organization as a Portfolio of Curves. That could potentially be very useful to you.

Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company

A great place to start is to read the book or go to the podcast, which will allow you to do more work on these topics. You can always email me at WJ@WhitneyJohnson.com or you can do WJ@TheDisruptionAdvisors.com. We changed our website, so I forget which website we are using, but those are probably the best ways to connect.

Folks, buy Whitney's books and have a read. These are excellent resources for you. I took a quick look at what looked like about twenty articles or artifacts at Harvard Business Review. You will want to take a look at those. Whitney and I were referencing something from 2012 and 2003, her initial article called Disrupt Yourself, of which there's a book of the same name.

Folks, take a look there for all of these amazing resources. Thank you again to Whitney for joining me. Team, thank you for reading the episode. If you enjoyed the show, please like and subscribe to our show and tell your friends. If there's something we can do to improve the value you get from this investment in time, please tell me. You can reach me at MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com and we love constructive criticism. That's my email and we respond to every note we get. Thanks, keep those tips coming our way. We will continue to get better at this and we will see everybody next time on the show.

Important Links

• Disruption Advisors

• Smart Growth

• The Innovator's Dilemma

• Disrupt Yourself – Article

• Liar's Poker

• The Bonfire of the Vanities

• Seth Godin – Past episode

• The Challenger Sale

• The JOLT Effect

• Episode 205 – Past episode

• WJ@WhitneyJohnson.com

• WJ@TheDisruptionAdvisors.com

• Disrupt Yourself

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

About Whitney Johnson

Whitney Johnson is the CEO of Disruption Advisors (thedisruptionadvisors.com), a leadership development company, helping you grow your people to grow your business, and was named by Thinkers50 as one of the ten leading business thinkers in the world (2021).

A world class keynote speaker and a popular lecturer for Harvard Business Publishing’s Corporate Learning, she has 1.8 million followers on LinkedIn where she was selected as a Top Voice in 2020; her weekly podcast Disrupt Yourself, is in the top .5% globally in terms of listenership.

Whitney is the Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author of Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company (Harvard Business Press) which Publisher's Weekly described as "cogent...insightful...practical...inspiring."

A former award-winning Wall Street equity analyst, she co-founded the Disruptive Innovation Fund with the late Clayton Christensen and has coached alongside Marshall Goldsmith. Whitney understands how companies work, how investors think, and how the best coaches coach.

Whitney is married, has two children, and lives in Lexington, VA where her family grows strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries and enjoys making jam.

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