In this episode, Bill takes a section of a recent LIVE Coaching Session called “The High Achiever’s Dilemma.”
He addressed five fundamental shifts that high impact players will have to make. If you’d like to be a part of the next LIVE Coaching Session that Bill does, go to https://resources.billcaskey.com/high-achievers to save your spot now!
Nobody starts a business and doesn’t think of growing their sales revenue. The only question is how to go about achieving the growth you envision for your company. Joining this episode is the CEO of Business Success Factors, Doug C. Brown, to share part of the knowledge he’s gained from growing thousands of companies. He drops some hard truths that business owners need to be facing and addressing when it comes to processes, systems, and the goal they’re trying to reach. He also talks about the necessity of assessments and audits, even if it’s something that everyone does not embrace. Also, learn the simple formula of business and realize how easy it would be if you can manage to detach yourself personally from the resulting outcomes of your process.
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I talked with a guy by the name of Doug Brown who works with companies in sales revenue. He’s a growth expert there. He’s worked with enterprise nationwide, Tony Robbins, Intuit, P&G, CBS, a lot of great experience, but he has a system that he talks about. His company is Business Success Factors. I thought it would be good. I don’t usually have people on who are in the same business that I’m in because I don’t want to confuse everybody because I have a very specific philosophy and I want that to come across, but he has similar philosophies. I wanted to have him on. I think you’ll enjoy it. Doug Brown, Founder of Business Success Factors.
I was always building businesses on the side, whether they were small businesses or trying to make them large. I’ve done about 35 of them and some of them have led me into some interesting roles as, let’s say, independent president of sales and training for guys like Tony Robbins, Chet Holmes, and Russ Whitney. I’ve done a lot of the backend for a lot of the trainers, built them sales teams, and things of that nature. What’s led me to where I am now is, I’ve worked with tens of thousands of businesses and I’ve discovered one thing. They all want to grow sales revenue but most of them don’t have a process or a system to do it, so I created that.
When I go into a business, whether it’s a $5 million or $500 million, you would even think the $500 million businesses would have good processes, and they don’t. Some do but it’s not given. When you talk about a process, that can mean a lot of different things. Give me your definition of it.
We can take sales methodologies and talk about them, whatever it might be. The system itself is about ten different facets in sales revenue growth and then the processes are those sub things within each one of those facets that make the facet work optimum.
Can you give me a hard example?
Get an assessment and audit the process. Audit sounds like a bad word, but the reality is, it reveals things. Share on XMost companies that I’ve worked with myopically focused on 1 or 2 facets. Let’s say they’re focused on usually getting new clients. That’s the big one for everybody. What they’re leaving out is, “How do you increase the buying frequency of that client or the transactional value of that client? How do you get that overall retention up? How do we increase the number of people selling for us?” Things like that. The speed to purchase, margins, prices, even things like meaningful communication, how are we communicating with our clients internally and externally? How are we improving the skillsets of the people that are within there? There are all kinds of facets within these processes, within the facet that a lot of people though are myopically focused on that 1 or 2 things, and they’re missing simple things a lot of times.
I like to say that people love to talk about the outputs and hate to talk about the inputs. What’s it going to take for us to get a new client? We resort a lot of times. As you say, “What are the behaviors? Let’s pound out 100 calls a day.” “Let’s do that.” Then that doesn’t work. We’ll go, “How about 200 calls a day?” We’re working on the wrong end of the problem a lot of times. You mentioned something about this idea of once we get a client, are we getting all we can go out of them and are they getting all they can out of us? How do we take our 1,000 clients that are doing $20 million and get that to $40 million? Maybe that would resolve our problem of pressuring our people and hiring a bunch of people to make 200 cold calls a day that doesn’t work on the front end?
We could reduce our expenses and improve our profitability on the top line. A lot of times, they’re not thinking about farming the account, but the system is not set up. The whole customer journey is not set up as a sale system. It’s set up as 1 facet, maybe 2. Marketing sort of and then sales. They forget things like customer service. Customer service can be a huge source of sales.
The customer journey stops when the first transaction happens than the customer journeys are. It was like, “That’s where it is? That shouldn’t be where it begins.”
They should be looking to expand the sale at every single turn throughout the whole customer journey, and they don’t. That’s why companies are poor at things like referrals, follow-up, and a bunch of things. They all have blind spots. You had mentioned $5 million, $500 million, or $5 billion. Every company has a blind spot. It’s usually only a few things that will unearth the revenue and get them that untapped revenue coming back into their lives. The wonderful part is they’ve usually spent the marketing money already, so that’s sitting there. It’s pure profit.
Sales Revenue Growth: All want businesses and sales revenue to grow, but most of them really don’t have a process or a system to do it.
There’s one thing to say that there’s always a blind spot, but I have my impression of what stops. Let’s say, it’s a $100 million company. You got a VP of sales, 4 or 5 sales managers, 30 or 40 people. What stops them from shining the light on their entire system of generating new clients and generating revenue from existing clients? There’s got to be some stopper or several.
There are several. One is they truthfully don’t know where they want to go. They’re honest, but there’s a difference between honesty and truth. The truth is the objective measurement. They truthfully do not know how much they want to grow by in the next twelve months. They get a number in their head. They go, “We could project this. We could do that.” There’s not this concrete, “This is going to be hit, and we’re satisfied being there. If we exceed this, great.” Most of them don’t know that benchmark. The second thing is people have emotions. A lot of times, even leaders in companies or divisions don’t want to be exposed to a certain group within. They might be doing things that they want to either cover-up. The third thing is they don’t know what they don’t know. They’re not investigating that because they don’t know. They can’t see it. It’s blind.
There’s one also that probably fits into one of those three that you mentioned. There’s a resistance some for some reason to, and it’s sexier than hell to talk about, “Let’s grow from $20 million to $25 million. Doug, here’s your quote. It was $1.2 million last year. It’s $1.5 million this year. Everybody, good? We’ll see you back here at the end of December.” There was very little attention paid to, “How are we going to do that? How do we get from $1.2 million to $1.5 million?” It’s easy to say, “Doug’s always done it before. Post pandemic, maybe there’s a different strategy or Doug strategy could get him to $2.5 million, but he’s bicycling around his territory trying to pick up leads or whatever the old antiquated thing.” There’s a reluctance to getting down and dirty into how are we going to make that happen? Do you concur or is that part of the clarity?
It’s part of the clarity from my definition, but I do concur because it’s not only part of the clarity, but it’s part of the blind spots in the process. Let’s say Doug is exhausted. Why is Doug exhausted at that point? What is causing the issue of exhaustion? Is Doug not leveraged properly on his abilities, his skillsets are not there, or is it the system that he’s within the of the customer journey? There are all kinds of reasons for it, but I fully agree with what you said.
When I bring people on, I always like to ask them a pointed question about, I’m a VP of sales or a CEO, founder of a small company, either way, you’re talking with Doug Brown, who is both CEO and Founder of Business Success Factor. What advice would you give to a VP of sales or president of a company who has read and said, “We might have an issue?” What would be 1 or 2 pieces of advice to begin the process?
Behind every corporate agenda is a personal mission. Share on XI would sit down and get truthful. Do we want to do something about this? A lot of companies talk about it but they don’t want to do anything about it. They’re uncomfortably comfortable. If you’re uncomfortably uncomfortable, then the next step is, “What is that true north? What is the goal that you truly want to achieve?” Most goals can be achieved. The resistance in the planning part of this is the key. Once the goal is set out, “Let’s get it assessed. Let’s find out where we’re at. Are there any impedances? Is there good stuff? What’s happening, that’s great?” Let’s get the whole picture, get an assessment, and audit the process. I know audit sounds like a bad word, but the reality is it reveals things. Once we do that section of it, let’s take the goal, take the assessment, where we want to go, where we are, and let’s build a growth plan to get there.
That’s a good point there about the clarity of where we are going. I don’t think companies, at least the ones I’ve worked with and I can’t say much about it because I don’t want to give away anything but there is a reluctance to set a goal out in the future and say, “By the time 2022 ends, 2 or 3 years out, we’re going to be this company, doing this business, and market with these kinds of people.” There’s such a reluctance to do that because it’s like, “We’d been through a lot in 2020. Maybe you had this clarity of focus. Maybe 2020 would have been an awesome year instead of an average year?” There’s this reluctance to get deep into clarifying where are we going and what does it look like when we get there?
We have to detach personally from the outcomes a lot of times. That’s the hard part because for a lot of business, especially who started their own companies organically or whatever and they’ve grown them to high proportions or they’re trying to grow them to high proportions, they have a lot of their own personal self invested in the business itself. The reality is that business is simple when you remove people from the equation.
Tell me more about that.
Think about it. It’s a simple formula. It’s money out, money in, equal something. That’s business. We all want the equals to be a plus sign. When we get people in there, they start getting thoughts coming into this. A lot of thoughts are great, but there are some non-serving ones that come into it. That’s where I think that reluctance comes from in a big way, especially if the owner has been the one who’s grown the company. She or he has their identity tied to the business, or internally the vice-president of sales or president of a division, they’ll tend to defend that even if they don’t want to.
Sales Revenue Growth: We have to personally detach from the outcomes in business because the reality is that business is very simple when you remove people from the equation.
A lot of companies equate it to the Super Bowl that was played in the US where Tom Brady won his seventh Super Bowl. As you look back to, when he left the original team, because he’s with a brand new team in 2021, Tampa BAY, only two teams came after Brady after he said, “I’m leaving New England.” One was Tampa Bay, who got him. The other one where the LA Chargers. Nobody else wanted him. Why? Because he was too old. “Why would I want a 42-year-old quarterback?” All these teams are saying, “Our goal is to get to the Super Bowl.” Here’s a guy who’s been there six times. If he wasn’t full-time quarterbacking, couldn’t he give you a little insight on how he got there? We are black and white sometimes. I start to wonder, “Did teams want to get to the Super Bowl, or is that just lip service?” I don’t want to take you into sports, but I think the same thing applies. We want to get to $12 million, but we’re not willing to do what it takes to get there, but we’d like to get there. “You don’t want to get there.”
Since I’m a New England Patriots fan, I grew up in Massachusetts. The thing is that Brady left for probably other reasons that we don’t know, but also he was offered, I think it was $6 million or $7 million more at his career place. Why not take it? A thought occurred to me in equating this to business. A lot of times, companies look at top-line revenue and go, “Our budgets were in-line. We are here. Everything’s working,” but then a guy like yourself, or I come along and go, “That’s nice. You grew by 22%. How do you know it shouldn’t have been 34%?” They’re like, “We take a look. There’s another 6% here. Another 2% here and 1% there.” For the same amount of money out, they could have been bringing in more money. I still will anchor myself that a lot of times, it comes back to the personal agenda because behind every corporate agenda is a personal mission of some sort. That’s how it works.
I can go from $22 million to $28 million if I buy my way into the extra $6 million and give away my products. Back to your original equation, cash in versus cash out equals something. It’s not just the top line. It’s what we are delivering to the bottom line. A lot of what you talk about delivers that, not to the top line but also in the bottom. Shortened selling cycles, understanding our customers better calling on the right people, instead of people who don’t fit. I presume that’s in a lot of your work. Doug, you said you had a checklist that our readers could access. Can you tell us how we can get ahold of that?
It’s a marketing and sales checklist. It’s a self-audit. It’ll give you an idea of how you are doing. You could email me at [email protected]. I’ll be happy to have one sent out to you. It’s an eye-opening experience if you’re going to do this because it will poke holes in your current playbook but it will show you some good stuff as well.
He’ll send the checklist back to you. Doug, it has been a real pleasure. We need to do this again later in 2021. I’ll catch up with you again. Thanks for taking the time to be on.
Thanks for having me, Bill. It’s been a lot of fun. I appreciate being here.
I am Doug Brown, CEO of Business Success Factors. I started working for my families business at the age of three, since that time I have started and built over 35 companies. I have three college degrees, and I am America’s number one expert in revenue expansion and sales optimization. During college at Berklee College, Northeastern University, and Salem State University, I supported myself by selling music equipment to colleges, universities, corporations, and some of the world’s biggest bands such as Aerosmith, Boston, Billy Joel, The Eagles, Extreme and others. I served 12 years in the US Army, during which I was awarded the battalion’s most distinguished soldier award graduating 2nd in my class and was then enrolled at the Massachusetts Military Academy.
After my service, I worked at and became the top-selling sales representative for a 2-billion-dollar company. These experiences laid the groundwork to form my own consulting and auditing company.
I have traveled to 47 out of the 50 US states and 14 countries where I have consulted, coached, advised, and trained thousands of people in business, some of those companies include Enterprise-Rent- Car, Nationwide, Intuit, Proctor and Gamble, CBS Television. I have also served as an independent president of sales and training for companies of Tony Robbins, Chet Holmes, and Russ Whitney. My efforts have collectively generated over 500 million dollars in sales—my last client-generated 3 million dollars in new sales in 5 weeks.
Are you able to distinguish your opinion from reality? In this episode, Bill Caskey helps you rethink the world as he makes the case for questioning your opinions and assumptions if you want to grow your business. Certain beliefs create assumptions. Bill shares three common beliefs that are driving your unconscious behaviors, and that you need to question for yourself and your company. Tune in and learn how you can grow your business by reinventing your opinions.
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I’m going to share with you some things that I’m working on. It’s always interesting to get a little behind the scenes when I listened to a speaker, an author or a podcaster and find out what they’re working on. I will share with you something now that I’ve been knee-deep in and it’s going somewhere. It’s not just an exercise in writing, although I enjoy that. This is designed to help you rethink the world. That may sound like a bigger bridge to cross than a guy like me would want to pursue. I have come to the belief and you’ve heard some of it here on the show. We have certain beliefs and these certain beliefs create assumptions the way the world is, “I believe this therefore I assume that.”
A lot of times, I hear that from my clients when I first start working with them. I start to share some of what I will call counterintuitive ideas, things that go against the norm. They will get up in the air, get their back up and say, “That wouldn’t work in our business. My boss would never let me go for that. Our customers would not tolerate that.” That’s all opinion. How we have come to believe dictates the assumptions we have about life and then that creates opinions. Not to get into the psychological makeup of it but I’m going to give you three here now. These three will tee off this idea in your brain about the question that you need to ask yourself, which is, “What else do I assume about the world?” That might just be an opinion and might not be reality. Let’s go with this.
By the way, if you are a high achiever, I want you to go to BillCaskey.com. At the top banner there’s a colored banner there for a waitlist. I’m pretty sure we’re going to do a High Achiever’s program. That’s for people who earn $200,000-ish and up and want to level up, pursue, leverage their assets and get to a whole new level. I’m assembling a group of those people. If you’re interested in at least knowing more about it, I’m probably going to be doing a webinar or a little get-together here soon. That’s no obligation. This is not any high-pressure thing. I only want people in this program who are truly committed to growing.
There are no sales at all involved. I’m opening it up first to my blog readers. Nobody even on my email list has heard about this. If you are interested, go to the website. Also, if you are interested in changing the game of selling, there is a document on the website below the banner. It’s called Ten Strategies to Change the Selling Game. Download that. It’s a PDF guide. It’s about 10, 12 pages. It’s got some videos with it. It’s good. If you want some free stuff from me that’s more tutorial-focused, that’s a good way to start.
How you do anything is how you do everything. Share on XWhat are these beliefs that we have accumulated? I will consider these erroneous beliefs or industry norms that I’m not sure are even right. Let me go through these. I’ve got 29 of these and I’m only going to go through three. A lot of this comes in my programming and coaching. I believe that I can only teach you so many sales tactics in how to handle it when the customer says X. What happens when the prospect decides not to buy? What happens when you get resistance? I can only teach that for so long. Frankly, I get a little bored with it because at some point that’s not the difference-maker.
The difference-maker is how you think about yourself, company, value, customer, role on the planet and purpose on earth. Those are the big issues. Why would I want to continue to work on the minor issues? It’s called majoring in the minors. Forget about the major issues, which is how one thinks about oneself and identifies in this world. I’m going to share with you three of these that are common beliefs that we have accumulated over the years, maybe or maybe not. Maybe for you, not all of these will apply but we’re on the spectrum at least of having these beliefs drive us and some of our unconscious behaviors.
Number one, your eagerness leads to more sales and to an eager prospect. The more eager you are and we see this a lot of times in hiring salespeople. A sales leader will come to me and say, “I want you to interview this person. We’re thinking about bringing him or her on. We want to make sure it’s the right decision. I want to get your set of eyes on it.” It doesn’t take me long. I don’t even have to do a profile test. It doesn’t take me long to look at that person through the filter of a prospect. If this person is going to be out working with prospects, I put my prospect hat on and ask myself the question, “What do I want this person calling on me?” If they’re too eager, not listening to a word I say, not thoughtful in their responses or too quick on the trigger to say something or answer a question, I know if they’re that way with me, they will be that way with prospects. How you do anything is how you do everything.
Eagerness is not a virtue. I want you to be committed. I want you to be all-in to your job but eagerness is a different animal. I don’t want you to be eager. I don’t want you to appear eager. The only eagerness you should have is the eagerness to find out if the problem the customer has is something we can solve. It’s not eager to sell and it’s certainly not eager to talk about yourself and how great you are. How is that helpful for the prospect? They don’t give a damn about that. This idea of eagerness has been misconstrued and we’ve taken it as a virtue. I don’t see it as a virtue at all.
Question Your Opinions: The only eagerness you should have is the eagerness to find out the problem the customer has.
I see it as something that will get in the way. I would rather have you take measured eagerness, be interested in the prospect, what they have to say, be curious about their pains, problems and circumstances but never be eager either to make the next call, set the next meeting or sell anything. Let that happen organically. There are a lot of things to do right there. If you do things right, your close rate goes way up because you’re not trying to make anything happen. It’s happening because the prospect wants your solution badly.
Number two, pressure is good. The more pressure you feel, the more likely you are to excel. Pressure is an interesting animal. I do think there are times when the need to get things done is there. You do what needs to be done. If you are out talking to a prospect and they have an interest and part of your process is putting together a proposal framework. I don’t want you to feel pressured to do that. It just has to be done. If it’s part of your process, it works, it’s going to help the prospect make a decision and help you decide if they’re the right people then you do it. You don’t feel pressured to do it. Most of the pressure that we feel comes from self-imposed sources. We put pressure on ourselves to be perfect, to be the ideal soldier, to be effervescent and magnanimous. We feel pressured to have people like us and take us seriously. That kind of pressure is a losing game because you’re pressuring yourself based on someone else’s opinion of you. It’s hard enough to influence let alone control it. Pressure is going to be a losing battle there.
Another thing about pressure is when you feel it, you exert it. When someone is putting pressure on you, you will put pressure on someone else. It’s a pass-through. You’re the pass-through mechanism. If your manager is putting pressure on you to make more sales, where do you think that pressure is going to go? It’s going to store it inside, a little bit of it if you will. A lot of it, you will pass it onto the prospect and they won’t even see it. It’s not like you’re saying, “I got to make a sale this month or I’m going to get fired. My boss is on my backside. Can you please help me?” You’re not saying that but it’s the small vibes that you give off that the prospect feels even subconsciously. They decide not to do business with you because they say, “This is about them, not about me. I think I’ll find another supplier.”
Pressure is not good. Getting things done is but when it turns into pressure, you’re not free to be at your best. I see this a lot in a business where a business owner has been working in his or her business for twenty years and they’re tired of it. They’re burnt out and they want to do something else but they’ve built this machine that they can’t get away from. Every day they feel pressure to do something that they don’t love. That is a recipe for illness and disaster. If you have a little bit of that, you don’t need to be a business owner to experience that. If you find yourself, “I’m not into what I’m doing now as I was several years ago.” The pandemic and disruption of 2020 spurred that on for a lot of us. It accelerated some insecurities and might even accelerate some skills and competencies but it changed things. You’ve got to ask yourself, “Do I love what I do?” When I get up in the morning every day, “Have I fallen in love with what I do with my customers, audience, market and whatever?”
When you feel pressure, you exert it. Share on XNumber three is one of my favorites. That is the idea, “I need to do more of what I’ve always done to get to the next level.” I’m putting this High Achiever’s program together. It’s a personal coaching group and that’s a lot of that group. What we’re going to do there is focus on, “What got you here may not get you to the next place.” In fact, it’s almost assured not to get you to the next place because things have changed. The world, market, internet, digital communications and a lot of things have changed. A lot of us are hanging on. I put myself here, too. Even though I talk about this a lot and consult with the client’s coach, there’s still a little bit of this that I am holding onto the old way. I remember we used to fax out invitations. We’d fax them out and 25 people would show up. I’d love to have that now with my knowledge. I would close twenty of them but that is not the way anymore.
There’s not a lot of fax machines hanging around waiting for my fax. I can wish and hope all I want that things go back to normal or the way they were or whatever normal is. The fact is that what got you to where you are now is probably not going to get you to 2X where you are now. If you’re a high achiever, I don’t care what kind of achiever you are. It doesn’t matter. There’s got to be a realization on your part and maybe now is it. It sounds like I’m preaching, “Come up to the front afterward.” At some point, there’s got to be a realization. There’s got to be an awakening inside of you that says, “I can’t keep doing the same things in the same way and expect to get massively different results or expect to get the same results and work less.” This is not only always about 2X-ing everything. Your income and revenue are not always about that. I want you 2X your quality of life, your sense of fulfillment and what you do. Often, what got us here won’t get us there.
The questions for you are, “What is there? What does there look like? What will get me there? Where am I going? How am I going to get there?” Those are the questions that will allow you to get out of this old mindset of, “I just do more of what got me here.” I’ve witnessed people who have changed and reinvented themselves. They have new energy and inspiration. They reignited the fire underneath them. It was like, “I used to do it this way. We’re not going to do it that way anymore. We’re going to do it this way.” There are tweaks along the way. A lot of times, there are infused energy in the psyche when you change things and say, “We’re going to get to a new goal but we’re not going to do the same things that got us here.” Take a look at those three things. As I talk about them, hopefully they resonated with you to the point where you start to examine, “What are some new beliefs?” New beliefs are awesome if you can start to believe something new.
I was listening to a psychologist talk about the disruption of fundamental axioms. In other words, it’s just disruption of things that you’ve come to believe are true. These three things are part of that. When we disrupt those and start to look at them, we can go in 1 of 2 directions. We can either go in awe and say, “If I could get out of this whole belief, look at the future that could be created for me. That’s awesome and awe-inspiring,” or we say, “That’ll trigger us, that shock. There’s no way. I think it won’t happen. It isn’t going to happen in my lifetime. There’s no way that would work on my world.” You go into a runaway from mode.
When I introduce things to you, I probably will lose readers because some of you will say, “Enough, Caskey. You’re crazy. You’re on crack. You’re doing something weird behind the scenes. You’re talking about stuff that I don’t even want to talk about.” We need to talk about it because if you’re like me, you have quite a few years of productive life left and you don’t want to keep repeating the same mistakes. Anyway, I hope that helps you. Go to BillCaskey.com. There are lots of free stuff there. Get on the waitlist for the High Achiever’s program if you’re not on it already. Also, the PDF guide, Ten Strategies to Change the Selling Game is on the website. See you next time. Bye.
Everything is easier when you’ve figured out the smooth and tight-knit process that works for your business.
In this episode, Bill Caskey helps you achieve that as he shares the six steps to creating the perfect sales process. Understand how you can trigger an event that will lead people to have an interest in your product or service. Learn as well the pitching strategy that million-dollar producers are obsessed about. In addition, Bill shares an approach that he found to receive less resistance when talking to a client regarding the problems you’re trying to solve.
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We’re going to talk about the perfect sales process. We talked about this a little bit before, but we’re going to go deeper here.
Whenever I start working with either a coaching client one-to-one, which I don’t do a lot, or The 2X Group, one of my small group coaching programs, or my leadership group, I always ask the question, “What is your vision for your business? What’s your ideal outcome?”
It’s hard sometimes to answer that question. I’ve talked about that before as well, but I want to talk about the ideal sales process. Forget about your income five years out. I’m not talking about that. We’re talking about the ideal sales process.
There are six steps to it, and it’s a framework. I want to share it with you because it’s important that we look at our own sales process and say, “Where are we off? Where is it not working?” My belief is that you should be closing 50% of the deals you’re proposed. If you’re going to get 50%, sales process had better be buttoned up.
There’s got to be some kind of triggering event. Sometimes a triggering event is you send out an email and it causes people to think. It’s that first step where you’re trying to create some interest in your product. If you think about it as the human nature element of the sales process, at some point, a person has to have an interest. They don’t go from no interest to buying. They go from no interest to interest. The triggering event is supposed to be that.
The reason they’re inviting you in is that they have a problem. If you do the right job on that first initial contact, that first initial conversation, it gets a whole lot easier for them to justify inviting you in. The key thing here in terms of strategy and attitude is don’t oversell. Listen to what they have to say. Listen to their circumstance or their dilemma if they have any. What are they trying to accomplish? Why did they decide to seek now? What is there about now that makes it important for them to pursue some engagement or some more information. The getting invited in step is number three.
In our world, we are very quick to pitch and very slow to ask, so be curious. Share on X
You haven’t found the problem yet.’” In our world, we are very quick to pitch and very slow to ask. Be curious. I always say that the highest achievers I know, the million-dollar producers and more, they are obsessed with understanding the prospect’s circumstance.
They want to know all about it. Why did you happen to do that? When did you try to get that fixed? What if you don’t fix this? What’s the cost of the problem? They’re obsessed with that. There’s something that stops us. I don’t know if it’s ego, probably a little bit of ego or if we’re impatient. We think sometimes that if we ask too many questions, it’s going to slow the sales cycle down. It will do the opposite. The more questions you asked and they got to be the right questions. They can’t be intellectual questions and manipulative. You’ve got to truly be curious about their circumstances.
You might have several meetings where you’re understanding the issues. You then go back and you return with a recommendation. I don’t like the word proposal. It sets up too much resistance. I like to think of it as a recommendation. Step five, you return with a recommendation and recap the problem. If you have dialed in with the prospect on how much the problem costs them to have, then that’s got to be in there too.
Perfect Sales Process: In terms of strategy and attitude, don’t oversell. Just listen to what people have to say and their circumstances.
Another thing that you do there, and we’re not going to talk about much on this episode, but you’ve got to have a success path. You’ve got to be able to look the prospect in the eye and say, “If you follow me on this journey and you engage me, let me tell you what you can expect. Let me tell you what the milestones are. Let’s talk about how this is going to work.” We are terrible at that. We hope the prospect trusts us. I know that we spend a lot of time talking about trust and relationships and all that. I buy that. Unless you are laying out what working with you looks like, then how are they to know? Are they just to trust you? You’re still a stranger to them. Even if you’ve had a couple of meetings, they still don’t know much about you. It’s important when you return with the recommendation, you also return with a success path.
6. You begin work. You calendar something. You say, “If you want to get this done by the end of June, we’re going to have to start May 1st. Here’s what it looks like. I’m going to need an answer by the end of this week or next week or whatever.” You become very timeline-oriented and focused.
If they start to give you grief or you sense that you’re moving too quickly for them, you can always back off and say, “Do I move too fast for you here? Do you feel pressure because that’s not my intention? My intention is you said you have this problem. It’s costing you $14 million a year. I figured there was an emergency. That’s why I’m urgent because I sensed that you are urgent.”
Your urgency is not urgency to close the business. It’s urgent to get the problem solved and start working on the problem.
That’s the ideal sales process.
Some event causes them to search and seek. They find you, invite you in, and reveal everything to you. You return with a recommendation, and then you timeline the work together. Sometimes it’s hard to follow because if the triggering event is cold calling on your part, that’s okay. It’s still a triggering event. If you’re good at finding the problem and starting to understand the circumstance that they’re involved in, that could be the triggering event. This is not to say it’s not a cold call, but you’ve got to be careful with the cold call because typically, they’re not set up that way. They’re set up to try to get an appointment. I don’t want to run appointments if the person has no pain, no interest, no inkling at all to be curious about their situation, whether they can be helped by me or by anybody.
Mindset shifts have been proven through time and experience as a good practice that you should employ to achieve your goals. In this episode, Bill Caskey talks about three specific aspects where you should be focusing on your mindset as a high achiever. He shares a tip on what to look for in the services of coaches and mentors to get the value you need. He also talks about our ego and how it relates to building our identity. Finally, Bill puts having expectations in a different light while giving his insight on what it means to have no expectations before a call.
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We’re going to go deep. I had a couple of guests on the last episode. Getting back to the knitting of the inner game, the mental side, the soul of selling and achievement. Is that sound scary? It should because I’m going to go on a little riff or tangent and share with you some things that I’m working on for our clients and myself. I’ve got a handful of things. Are you ready? I’m ready. When someone asks me to help them, I’ve got several coaching clients. I don’t take too many because it’s time-consuming and it’s expensive for them. I also believe that the best work doesn’t come necessarily one-to-one. It comes in a group. All of my small group coaching programs have an element of one-to-one to them so there’s always happening but I’ve got a couple of coaching clients. I asked one of them, “Tell me what coaching is.” She has been a client and she’s doing well. Her income has gone up and things are starting to unfold for her. She asked me, “Why is that? Is it because I have another human being to talk to? Is there something magical, secret or surreptitious?”
Here’s the way I look at coaching. If you hire a coach, he/she should be more interested in dissolution than the solution. Somebody comes to me and says, “I’m not earning enough money.” I say, “My solution is you’ve got to work harder, grind more and make more calls.” That’s a solution. A dissolution is where we say, “Why do we have the problem of not making enough money? Where is the belief inconsistent with what’s true?” Meaning there’s probably some belief that they have or that I have. I have a lot of these beliefs or areas for the potential to be released by dissolving old beliefs.
Our ego is there to protect our identity. Our ego will always be at a preference for being right. Share on XWhen I say dissolution, I mean the dissolving of old beliefs. Maybe one of their beliefs says, “I’m not worth $500,000 a year,” or there’s a belief that if I got up to where I was leading the company, I would be asked to take on more responsibilities. I’d be asked to move to London or Munich, or my life would change externally because of my success so I’m going to tamp it down and put the governor on a little bit. It could be all those things or one of them. Dissolution or dissolving the prior beliefs is the best gift a coach can give you, whether it’s me or an inside coach inside your company. If your coach is not working on the dissolution of prior beliefs that are holding you back, do you think you need solutions for? You don’t. You don’t need solutions for that. It’s like, I’ve always believed that we all know exactly what we need. We just don’t do it. The reason we don’t do it is that we experienced resistance. That resistance comes in the form of prior beliefs that get in the way.
Another element that we need to put into our programming and I’m coming a little bit clean here with this because we don’t. It holds my company back in the coaching and the training back from the people that pay us. We’re giving pretty good value. People realize awesome results from the work but it could even be bigger if we worked on this idea of change. You and I have built up an accumulation of beliefs, opinions, practices, education, and knowledge over the years, whether you’re 27 and have been in sales for 5 years or 57 and been for 35 years. We have all built up this identity and this is who we are. I come along and say, “You need to change how you talk to your prospect. Here’s what I want you to do first.” The person says, “That’s all well and sounds good but I can’t use that with my customers.” What they’re saying is, “That’s not me. That’s not who I’ve come to know as me.”
Mindset Shifts: Dissolution or dissolving your prior beliefs is the best gift a coach can give you.
This word identity is very confusing. We hear about identity politics. That’s not what this is. The identity is who do we think we are or who has built this structure, this framework around who we are. If I were to say to you, “I’ve got this opportunity to make $1 million.” You say, “It’s great because I’ve wanted to do improve my income in the last couple of years.” I say, “Meet me at the corner of 6th & Vine. There’s a bank there. You and I are going to rob that bank. There’s $2 million they keep. We’ll split it. Ready to go.” If you’re a bank robber, you’d probably say, “Fine, let’s go.” Chances are a person of integrity. If you’re reading this blog and you’re in business, you would say, “No, I’m not going to do that. That’s not me. I want the million dollars but I’m not going to sacrifice my integrity to get there.” That’s a stretch example of that’s not me. I would never say that to a customer or prospect. I never shoot a video. That’s not me. I’m not good in front of the camera or on the mic. All that is the identity that we’ve built up and it could be.
This is where it gets interesting. Our ego is there to protect our identity. It will always be a preference for being right. I may say that I want to double my income, but if I see myself as $100,000 a year person out of $300,000 per year person, and I don’t want what comes along with $300,000, I can say all I want that I want to double or triple my income. It isn’t going to happen because my identity is locked up in my old self. Part of the change if you’re the VP of Sales, you are working with people, you’re a coach, or you’re a performer. If you want to change, there’s plenty of change that should happen. We typically operate at a fraction of what’s possible, but it’s only possible if we’re willing to look at who we are and our identity and allow ourselves to say, “That may have been my behavior for the last many years, but I’m not defined by that. I’m not defined by how I sell, how I ask questions, or how I lead people through the process. That doesn’t define me. It’s behavior and action.”
Change is only possible if we're willing to look at who we are and our identity. Share on XThe closer you can get back to your identity and not let all of these opinions in inform it. You get back to where you’re nimble and you can change. Somebody says, “You should have a YouTube channel, a show every Friday afternoon where you take questions from your audience.” You say, “I don’t know but I give it a go. Let’s try it.” I love that phrase, give it a go, versus the other way, “I don’t have a camera and I don’t have this. What would they think? Who am I going to talk to? What do I know?” You get all that resistance. That’s your identity saying, “That’s not me.”
Number three is the idea of no expectation. I was listening to a podcast by Peter Crone. He was on Aubrey Marcus’s podcast. Peter is British. He coaches sports athletes and pretty high-income people. All he works on is the mindset side. He doesn’t teach people how to have a better stroke. He teaches you how to get out of your own way. One of the things he mentioned, which reminded me of one of our issues that we talk about is having no expectation prior to a call. If you’ve got a meeting set up and it’s the first call with a huge prospect, what do we do? We start getting a little tight, planning, and we over plan. We say, “In the 27th minute of this call, here’s what I’m going to do.” We over scripted, we over-planned, especially if you’ve got a manager who’s saying, “What’s our plan. What are we going to do? We’ve got four people going. We’ve got PowerPoints with 150 slides. How are we going to do it?”
Mindset Shifts: When you go with no expectation, you’re free. The idea of having expectations is deceptively harmful for you and your prospect.
I would rather you go into these situations with no expectation. You don’t expect the deal, be awesome or fail. I know this goes against a lot of what you’ve been taught. You maybe even teach your people. When you go with no expectation, you’re free. You’re not encumbered and enslaved by the expectation of, “If I get this life, we’ll be better. If I don’t get this life, we’ll suck.” All that stuff is noise. It gets in the way of you being present with the prospect, which is what I thought we wanted to do in the first place. This idea of having expectation is deceptive. It’s deceptively harmful to us and the prospect. We always say, “We want to serve our customers. That’s what we want to do and bring value to customers.”
We go in with all these expectations and it ruins the present moment. We start to act in a manner that is in line with what we want to happen. What difference does it make in what we want to happen? Isn’t it the prospect’s decision? I thought we were in it for the prospect. Now we’re not. Is that where we made the change. Having no expectation is a way for you to exert your own freedom. I have found and my clients have found the less expectation you have, the better the outcomes because you’re able to be present with the person you’re in front of or the people. You’re able to find out what’s happening in their world, what’s going on, working and what’s not.
Let me share with you how we would look at that. It’s an organic, casual and useful conversation rather than something that’s all scripted out. Have no expectation, try that on. See if it fits and you can tell your manager. If you’re a manager of a team and you’re getting ready to do a presentation or something say, “Let’s try this. In years, is this going to matter? Does any of this stuff matter?” The answer is no. It doesn’t. It matters at the moment. We want to put our best foot out there and we want to do well. Would we rather have the business than not have the business or the prospect say yes than no? Of course, but that’s not going to define us whether we get this deal or not. You can’t let it define you.
Try having no expectations. That doesn’t mean we don’t prepare or have an agenda. It means that psychologically, we don’t want to constrain and enslave ourselves to some expectation. It has nothing to do with what the prospect wants. Try those things out. I welcome you. If you’re a high achiever and you are in that place where you’re saying, “I need to reinvent myself. I’m doing the same thing I’d been doing for the last many years and it’s still working a little bit but I’m on the cusp of some big things. I want to focus on myself, my own growth and mindset.”
I invite you to go to BillCaskey.com. At the very top, there’s a banner there that says, “Waitlists for the High Achiever’s program.” I am strongly considering doing a High Achiever’s program with a handful of people, 1 or 2 groups, but we’re limiting it to the number of per group of 10 or 12. Taking you through a High Achiever’s course, people who earn $200,000-ish a year and have tremendous upside. Go there and get on the waitlist. I make no promises about whether this thing is going to happen or not. I’ve been talking about enough. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen at the end of the first quarter of 2021. Put your name in. There’s no obligation. It doesn’t cost anything and I’ll send you some thoughts. I’m working on a document that might help you too. I’ll send that to you. See you next time. Bye.
In the second of a two-part series on some tips for high achievers, Bill Caskey takes a look at why you should start building your online platform and how it all ties down into your personal branding. He talks about digitizing your connections and making digital content for people to sample you, get their trust, and ultimately do business with you. Finally, he dives deep into accountability and emphasizes why it’s needed.
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We are on a journey here to part two of our two-part series on how to be a higher achiever. That’s not the title of it, I don’t have a title of it, but I do know this. I get a lot of email and sometimes even calls from people who are high achievers, already good at what you do, but you want to do more. You want to be better, but you don’t want to burn yourself out doing it. Grinding is not the way to go from $200,000 a year to $900,000 a year. There are not enough grinding hours in the day to do that. We’ve been taking a look, if you have not read to last episode, read this one and then go back and read to that one. They’re not necessarily sequential, but I’ve got seven tips here. We talked about some of the traps that a high achiever faces in last episode. I’m not going to go over those again, but I will quickly recap the first four of my seven tips.
Number one is get clear on vision. Where are you going? What do you want life to look like? Not that it’s bad now, what do you want it to look like in your ideal future? Number two, what’s your required mentality in order to get to those things? If we don’t change the mind, we can’t change the market. Change your mind first and figure out what those things are. Number three is limiting beliefs. Where are you limiting yourself? You might even call this limiting self-beliefs because these are beliefs about you. This has nothing to do with the outside world.
This is only what you believe about you, about your future, about your potential, about your role on the planet, about your purpose, which brings me to number four, purpose. Why do you do this? What’s behind it all? Not just why are you here traipsing around the earth, that might be part of your purpose, but why do you do what you do in your business? Is there a real purpose or is it to make money? Hopefully, it’s more than that. I think most high achievers have a purpose beyond money. Money can be a by-product and a submission, but I don’t think it can be your sole purpose.
Those are the four things that we talked about last episode. I also mentioned that I am considering putting together based on the feedback that I got from the last session and over the last few months, putting together a high achievers small group coaching session series. These would be for people who are in the $200,000-ish range and want to grow more. If you’ll go to BillCaskey.com, at the very top, there’s a thin banner. You’ve got to have to look for it. Get on my wait list. There’s no commitment there. I’m not going to be charging your credit card or anything, but I want to know who’s interested and who’s not. If you’re interested in something like that, get on the wait list. As I start to craft this thing, I will let you know and keep you updated. Let’s get back and talk about 5, 6 and 7.
High Achievers: If you’re a high achiever that wants to get to the next level, you’ve got to digitize your connection points.
Number five, the high achiever needs to think digitally by building his or her platform. I dumped this into the same area as personal branding, but a lot of the way you got from where you were several years ago to where you are now, was from grinding. It was from physically showing up at networking events, making calls, doing deals and getting referrals. I think all those things still work although I know with COVID the networking thing probably hasn’t so well, but it could be online. I’m interested in you building your brand online, building a platform. A platform could be LinkedIn. I’m not just talking about getting on LinkedIn and linking to a whole bunch of people until you have 5,000 connections. What are you going to do with that?
I’m talking about creating digital content online so people can sample you. People can say, “I’ve been watching Phil’s videos. It’s time for me to buy a building in downtown Chicago. I like Phil’s videos. I’m going to call him and see if maybe he’ll work with me.” The idea here is that high achievers want to get to the next level. They’ve got to digitize their connection points. Building your platform and your brand is all part of that. I’m not necessarily talking about blogging or vlogging. I’m saying, “If you’re not consistently producing content, and I like video and I like audio, written is fine, that’s helpful to your market.” That’s critical. It can’t just be all about you, how great you are, how great your company is. We know because we’ve asked you. You say it’s great. This content needs to be, “How am I going to help my customer? How am I going to help them walk through the processes?”
Number six, as we talked about with vision, you’ve got to have a clear understanding of where you’re going. Number six is building the plan. I call it the plan suite. The plan suite are 3 or 4 different plans. There’s the longer term 3 to 5, if some of you want to go ten, you can. I know some people have 25-year goals. I feel like that’s a little too far out there especially for a guy my age, but 3 to 5 is a good starting point. Let’s say, “What do I want to be, do, have, earn? What is my lifestyle? What do I want it to look like in five years?” That’s a good space. That’s the end goal, 3 to 5 years.
We’ve got the one-year plan. We’re shortening it up and saying, “The next year, what do I want to accomplish? What skills do I need to have? What are my mindsets? What are some of my limiting beliefs I need to break through? How am I going to build my platform?” Virtually anything that we talk about in these seven could appear on a one-year plan. I have all of my small group coaching clients, if we do this high achiever program, we’ll do it there, create a one-year plan. You would be shocked about how many people come to me six months into the year and say, “I’m done for the year. Everything that I had on my plane has come true.”
It’s not any kind of magic. It’s when you write something down and you refer to it often and as you’re building your monthly plan, you’re referencing those one-year milestones, goal-setting and goal-achievement is not that difficult. When we don’t write it down and we don’t have a plan and we don’t have an action-oriented way to implement those things, then it becomes a difficult. The third element of the plan, we’ve got the five-year, we’ve got the one-year, we got some a 30 or 90 day. Some people like the 90-day thing. I’m more of a 30-day guy. That would be the next one. You’re using your one-year plan to reference when you’re planning your 30-day plan.
If we don't change the mind, we can't change the market. Share on XIf your one-year plan is, “I need to improve my video skills,” and it’s August and you haven’t done it yet, then get to work. That should be part of your monthly plan is, “I want to reach out to someone and have them coach me on video skills.” The other plan is probably the short-term, one day, one week. I like the weekly plan, but at some point, you need to know what you’re going to be doing every day. I like to do that Friday for the next week. That’s up to you. Those are the four plans in the plan suite. Number seven, the last one and I can’t overestimate the importance of this and that is an accountability factor. I call it a factor because it doesn’t have to necessarily be a group, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a person, but you’ve got to find some way to be accountable to someone outside of yourself for the behaviors required to get to your level of success that you want to.
I don’t like it to be a spouse or a family member. Preferably I like to have a coach, someone from the outside who doesn’t base on whether I win or lose. There’s too much garbage and drama that goes along with that. That’s why I don’t like spouses to be your accountability partner because they’re in the game with you. A coach has to be sitting on the sidelines, looking at the game. That’s why I like coach and small groups. We have a group called The 2X Group, which is a sales B2B sales group. That is exactly that. We hold each other accountable in a nice, gentle way. We don’t spend a ton of time each session on it, but we do spend a little bit of time.
When I commit to another human being and look them in the eye and say, “By the time we meet next, I will have this lead generation program written.” I have an extra added level of incentive and commitment to do it. How many times have you written the paper the day before it’s due when you were in school? It’s accountability. It’s due. I put it off until the last minute and that’s not good, but at least I got it in. It’s the same thing with any accountability group, factor or coach. Have somebody around you who holds you accountable. They don’t babysit you. They don’t call you at 6:00 AM to make sure you’ve rolled out of bed or lifting weights already. They don’t make sure you’re not eating donuts all day. That’s not what an accountability partner does. Accountability partner meets you on a frequent basis, weekly, biweekly and you check in with each other.
Those are my seven things. If you liked these and if you feel like, “I’m doing well, but there’s another gear, but I don’t want to work harder. That’s clear. I don’t want to go from 50 hours a week to 90 hours a week to make an extra $200,000.” You should not. If you might be interested in what I’m putting together, I’m working out some of the details now. I don’t know exactly what it looks like or what costs, but I’m looking for 10 to 15 people who might want to join me on this journey of high achievers.
We’ll talk more about the money later. If you’re interested, go to BillCaskey.com. On the top upper part there’s a little thin banner there. Click on that, it’ll take you to a page. We’ll also be sending you out something too. I’m working on this document called The Required Mindsets of the High Achiever. It’s not done yet. It will probably be another couple of weeks, but I will send that to anybody who puts their name on the waitlist as a gift. I enjoyed having you. I’m glad that you read every week.
High achievers usually have a slightly different view of what’s possible in the world. In this episode, Bill Caskey talks about the constant need of high achievers to re-envision themselves as they grow and operate on a different plane. Learn the traps that most high achievers fall into that you may be trapped in as well and the things high achievers need access to. Tune in and learn why you may need to rethink your own goals and possibilities.
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We are going to speak about high-achievers. Those are the people who you might be one and you might not be one. There’s no shame if you aren’t, but this is going to be speaking to those people who are in the $200,000-ish range and above, either an entrepreneur, a business owner, a VP of sales or a sales professional, and primarily someone who has upside potential in that income. We’re speaking to the elitist achievers. If you’re not in that income range, that’s cool. You can still read. I will never ever know, but the topic deals with that group. I might even make this a 2 or 3-part series because I have so much to get to.
Here’s where this topic came from. I have quite a few people in one of my small group coaching programs. We call it The 2X Group, who is in that income range. They’re at higher levels of income. What I have found is that those people have a slightly different view of what’s possible in the world. They have accumulated some assets, have some money to invest in themselves and their business. I was watching a guy named Benjamin Hardy, who’s written several books on Psychology and personality. He said that we have to keep re-envisioning ourselves every few years because we learn things, have experience, get wisdom, and get financial wherewithal. If we say, “I set my vision ten years ago and we haven’t changed it, then the person we are now is capable of so much more or so much different.” By more, I’m not talking about working harder either. I’m talking about reaping the rewards from that knowledge and wisdom.
High Achievers: You have to keep re-envisioning yourself every few years because you learn things, have experience, get wisdom, and get financial wherewithal.
I have found that the highest achievers in the top 2% or 3% range of income earners have different needs of different things they want to work on. If you look at Maslow’s Hierarchy, they’re not looking at shelter as a big foundational need for them. They’ve got that checked off. They’re not looking for belonging. They have that checked off. They’ve got good families, got good works situations, got good clients that they are also friends with. As we get higher in Maslow’s Hierarchy, self-actualization, self-esteem, what’s possible and visioning, all those things they do need help with. That’s the purpose of this episode. It’s to introduce you to some of these things.
You are saying, “Where is this going? I feel like this is going somewhere.” It might be, I don’t know. I am giving some thought to spinning up a group of 8 to 10 high-achievers. I don’t know yet if there’s interest. There might be but I don’t know. Here’s what I would ask you to do. Read this blog in my website, BillCaskey.com. At the top of that, there was an orange bar, click on that, and there will be a waitlist for you. If it opens up how much it is, when it is, how it is, what’s going to be covered, but get on the waitlist. I’ll send you a couple of valuable emails to some other things follow-up to this. You have to earn $200,000-ish a year to get into this program.
If you’re a $30,000 person, it’s not for you. There are several traps that high-achievers fall into. I don’t think this is just high-achievers, but it’s everyone. There’s the ambition trap where it’s never enough. I’ve got an appetite for more. I’ve got to work harder. I’m doing well, but there’s much more I could be doing. That’s that trap. At some point, you lose sight of what’s important because you’re always striving for the next hill to go take. Two is the imposter trap. It is the feeling of fraud. It’s those deep inadequacies. I have a little bit of this or a lot of it. I’m not sure, but I know I struggle with this. It shows up for me is I will come up with an idea of a product similar to look at high-achiever product.
If you get the mindset stuff right, everything else trickles up from there. Share on XIt used to be that I would talk myself out of it as quickly as I talked myself into it. That’s the imposter trap, “Do you know what I could do with this and that? We could do this. We could do a show, LinkedIn video and have a website.” At some point you say, “It’s not me. That’s not for me.” That’s the imposter trap. In imposter syndrome, you’re saying, “This is a great idea,” but then you’re talking yourself out of it. The third trap is the comparison trap. I’ve always heard the term contrast, but don’t compare. It’s hard not to compare ourselves to others. It’s not just others, but it’s what we envisioned for ourselves. “By this time in my life, I thought I would be X, and I’m not.”
That’s a trap you get into. Finally, there’s that perfection trap, which is a perfect as my line in the sand, and anything less than that is not good enough. It is a constant reminder when I’m putting something out there, and there’s a mistake made in the copy or, “Why didn’t I think of that? I should’ve.” That’s that perfection trap. Those are traps we can’t follow into, but we do. Here’s what I find is going on inside the mind of the high-achievers. Number one, they want to continue to grow their numbers, but they don’t want to burn themselves out.
The idea of going from $200,000 to $700,000 if I have to work 40 more hours a week, “It’s not going to happen. I don’t want to do it.” You shouldn’t do it. There are ways to get you to that $700,000 mark without burning yourself out. Another thing that I hear from high-achievers is, “I don’t feel like I’m leveraging my talents and skills. I don’t feel like I’m doing enough of the things I’m good at, what I would call the zone of genius or the high pay activity.” Zone of genius was a term by Gay Hendricks in a book called The Big Leap.
He talks about, “You have things and I have things that we’re naturally good at,” but we only spent an hour or two a week on those things. It was like, “Why are we spending twenty hours a week doing things we’re not good at or don’t get paid for, and then that sacrifice is a time in our zone of genius?” A lot of people feel like, “Am I leveraging my God-given talents and man-acquired talents along the way?” Here’s another concern, “I feel like I’m proud of what I’ve done. I’m earning a good income and have a good stable job. I know some people don’t. I’m thankful, blessed and grateful for that, but is this all there is to it? I keep doing the same thing. It’s like Groundhog’s day. It’s the same thing day in, day out. I’m trying to infuse myself with adventure and for other things but sometimes, I feel as if this is all there is.” I know we’ve heard that saying a long time.
High Achievers: Building your brand is not always about making more money. It might be how are you going to give back.
I feel like high-achievers have that because they operate on a different plane and a different perspective. “I don’t feel like I’ve built my personal brand well enough.” This goes for almost all high-achievers. There’s a certain amount of reluctance to build a brand. Once you get to a place where you deserve to build a brand, it’s almost like it has the opposite effect. We’re reluctant to do it because we say, “Why would I build a brand? I’m doing fine. I’m reaching out to people going to networking events. Everything is going well. I’m pulling in my $250,000 a year. Why would I want to go down another path?”
My reaction to that is, “Why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you want to tell your stories? Tell the stories of prospects and clients, tell your stories of how you’ve helped people, tell stories of how people have come to you in bad shape, and through your wisdom and talent have helped them transform their lives or improve their business results or outcomes. Why would you keep that from the general public? Would you keep that from your audience?”
It’s going to take the opposite approach. Building your brand is not always about making more money. Usually, it is. It’s about how are you going to give back? How are you going to take the experience you have and send it back out to the world and the market? This is not an exhaustive list, but I hear this idea of accountability. Whenever I start a small group coaching program, as we do, I always ask, “What’s one thing you want to get out of this group? It’s bizarre in a way. Almost always it’s the highest achievers who say, “Accountability.”
It comes from the high-achievers knowledge that that’s exactly what’s going to get him or her to the next level. It’s accountability. Yet we’re reluctant to ask for it from our managers when a guy like me comes along and does a small group mastermind program. That’s where people want to go, especially the high-achievers. Accountability is huge. I’ve got a couple of clients in The 2X Group that I offer extra accountability sessions. It’s transformed their business because every week we chat only 10 or 15 minutes, and it helps them. When they’re thinking about putting something off, they know they can’t because they know I’m going to ask them about it. They do it and doing it works.
Here are a handful of things. I’ve got about 9 or 10 things that I think the high-achievers need to get access to. I’m going to share with you a handful and then we’ll come back next episode and talk more. I have this in a pie chart. One section might be 25% of the pie chart. One might be less depending upon the importance of each one, but this one is important. I’m not sure what percent to give it. What is your vision? What is your ideal outcome for 1, 2, 5 years down the road? Do you have constructed a vision of where you want your life to be? Your financial life, business life or relationship life. We’ve got lots of different lives. Where are you going? High-achievers need this. They must have this. They must start thinking about it differently than just assets or financial because there’s more to life than that. That’s one part of life, but there’s more to it.
The second thing is, what are the required mindsets that you’re going to need to adopt or embrace if you’re going to level your business up? What kinds of mindsets do you need? How do you look at the world? How do you look at your value? How do you look at your customers? How do you look at your roles in the customer’s life? Those are all mindset issues. If you get the mindset stuff right, everything else falls from there. It trickles down from there. It trickles up. If you get your mind right, everything else follows. Mindset is an important part of this. We’ve got vision and mindset.
Number three, it’s important to pay attention to limiting beliefs. We hear a lot about limiting beliefs. We don’t hear much about how to unlimit them. The first step is you have to get clear on what you believe about yourself, and that’s not easy. Sometimes you need another human being there to help shine the light on what your current beliefs are. One way to look at your current beliefs is what are your results? It’s almost impossible for you to believe something different than your results are getting you. If you’re a $200,000 a year person, and you say, “I’m a $500,000 a year person masquerading as a $200,000.” You’re not. Your beliefs are you are a $200,000 a year person. If you thought you were $500,000 a year person, you’d be earning $500,000. That’s not always the case but generally, your beliefs are congruent with your results. If you want to go from $200,000 to $500,000, you’ve got to check out those beliefs that might limit you from getting there.
Your beliefs are congruent with your results. Share on XHere’s the fourth thing, and then I’ll pause and we’ll do the others later. Why are you here? Why are you on this planet? What’s your purpose? What are you here to do? Alignment of purpose is critical because it’s the fire that will be released and the energy will be released once you decide what it is and land on what it is. My purpose in life that I’ve come up with here over the last couple of years is to use my experiences, my talent to share with the world, so people can expand what’s possible for them. My purpose is not to have everybody be a top-level achiever. My purpose is to take what I’m learning and share it in a way that people can consume it like we’re doing on this show. It’s one good example so that people can expand what’s possible for them.
Everything that I do needs to be focused on that purpose whether it’s a fee-based program or a free video on LinkedIn. I always believe that is focused and aligned with my purpose. What is your purpose? This is not the special purpose like Steve Martin had in The Jerk but it’s why are you here? Are you incorporating and aligning what you do in your business to why you’re here? You’re not here to earn money. It might be an output of the purpose, but that’s not the purpose. If you can get clear on this, it will unleash energy in your world.
We’re going to go through this a little bit deeper next episode. If you like the overall topic and might consider being a part of a group if we do decide to assemble one, go to BillCaskey.com, the orange bar at the top will say something like High-Achiever. Click on it, put your name and email address. There also might be a question there too that I ask you about what you might want to include if you decided ever to do something like this. I have no pricing other than I know I’ve got a handful of people who want to do this. I’m opening it up to my readers to get on the waitlist. Hopefully, that helps. I love you, guys. I appreciate you. If you want to leave a review on iTunes, I would love that. Thank you. Bye.
There are times that the one blocking your path to progress and success is no other than yourself, and the only way to get through is battling your inner enemies head on. Jay Maymi joins Bill Caskey in this episode to impart a lesson on doing so and doing it effectively. Jay discusses the importance of having the proper mindset in order not to become a product and a victim of your environment. Understanding that everyone is made the same, he iterates the defining factors that separate you from others. Jay also shares the strategies and techniques he’s developed to give you that edge against your inner enemies.
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I am glad to be with you now. I think you’re going to enjoy my special guest. His name is Jay Maymi. He’s written many books on selling. He reached out to me here. He hosts a radio show in Northern Texas on a Dallas radio station and talks about business. He’s an entrepreneur and talks a lot. He’s written a book about the mindset of selling. We love that topic. He goes a little bit in a different direction, a little bit deeper in some areas than we have. I thought you’d like to know some of his perspectives. Here’s my interview with Jay Maymi.
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Jay Maymi is our guest now. I call him Mr. Eclectic. He does a lot of things like entrepreneur, actor, author and radio host. Who knows what else he will tell us he does? Jay speaks to us from North Texas. He is the host of that radio show on 570 AM KLIF in Dallas. Jay, welcome to the show.
I appreciate you having me.
You reached out to me here so I thought, “Here’s a guy who’s done a lot of things in his life and has written several books.” Your story is fascinating. Can you give us a rundown on who the heck Jay Maymi is?
Whether you realize it or not, we're formed with the same organics. What separates us is usually our environment. Share on XJay Maymi is a body double. I do have a twin whose name is Joe Maymi. We are adopted twins from a Hispanic household. My parents came here from Puerto Rico in the 1960s. They settled in Spanish Harlem, a place called El Barrio in New York, which is where I’m originally from. My parents had decided to adopt after my mother not being able to bear children after three attempts. The story goes. They went down to the agency. This was back in the ’60s. You could just show up and say, “I want somebody,” and they’ll give you somebody.
They got a BOGO deal, a Buy One, Get One. They went home. Needless to say, it’s economically challenging enough to raise one child, let alone two, in those days. My mom had to stay home and stop working at the factory. My father had to pick up a fourth part-time job in order to make ends meet. It was economically very challenging for us. I grew up in meager means, just enough to put food on the table and clothes on our bag. I didn’t have all the fancy stuff that kids had.
It was a rough neighborhood where you could easily find ways to get into trouble if you wanted to make money the wrong way. Me and my brother decided if we wanted to have a new pair of sneakers and all the cool things that kids had, we had to go out and figure out a way to make money on our own doing the right way. We started up a ‘picking up bottles and cans’ business for a nickel when we were thirteen years old. That started in me an entrepreneurial development where now it’s flourished and continues to flourish in many expressions.
You came up in not the best of worlds in terms of economics. A lot of us who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s had decent housing and enough to put food on the table. As you said, “My parents never dressed me in anything but hand-me-downs and rags.” There was something glorious about that because when we look around and say, “I guess if it’s going to be, it’s going to be up to me to do something.” Tell us a little bit about the attitude that that upbringing might have given you.
The reality is that you can either become a victim of your environment, your environment will shape you and your destiny, or you could certainly decide, “This is not who I am. I will not become a product of the environment. I’m going to bend the will of the universe.” I decided to do the latter. For me, I look back on my life now, I think about those challenging times as a blessing. That developed in me a character of determination, hard work, grinding and recognizing that everything that I’ve been able to accumulate is a blessing. I’m very appreciative of it. I take nothing for granted. My story, so far, is still developing. I still have a lot more to go and things to do, but now it becomes a testimony. The greatest thing someone could walk away with when they exit this existence and dimension is to be able to have someone say, “That guy left us a positive role modeling of how to thrive even in difficult situations.”
We’re going to shift to sales now since I know you’ve written several books about sales, sales psychology and some devotional books. I’d like to get into a little bit of that because most of my audience are either VPs of sales, presidents, sales managers, sales professionals, anybody who acquires customers or builds and grows accounts are in my audience. When we started talking about the psychology, I was struck by it because I don’t think enough people are talking about it. We talk about the psychology of the buyer a lot. We don’t talk much about the psychology of the seller. If you could give us a few minutes on how you hopped on that topic and then we’ll dive a little deeper into some of the strategies?
Battling Inner Enemies: You can either become a victim of your environment or decide that you will not become a product of it and that you’re going to bend the will of the universe.
It’s interesting, I have written a handful of books on psychology of selling, subliminal sales techniques, prospecting, closing, and a number of different areas in sales that I think a lot of novice sales professionals struggle with. At a certain point, as I was speaking with a number of different individuals, even in my own organization, which I’ve trained and hired financial representatives, I realized, “After a while, you can provide enough training, techniques, tactical stuff and product training as much as someone could utilize, but why is it that that person who was probably over-trained still struggles, doesn’t excel, their performance never reaches any peak, and they’re trafficking at that novice level? You have those who don’t need much, but they soar.”
There’s got to be more than training and motivation. I realized, “What’s happening behind the scenes?” I started to dig back into my academic degrees of Psychology, Behavioral Sciences and Social Work. I said, “There is something that has to be going on behind the scenes.” I didn’t have to go very far than my own life. I said, “Let me see what’s going on in my head. Why do I struggle? Why do I have starts and stops at times?” I realized that I was dealing with a lot of head trash and inner struggles, what I call invisible enemies, that I had to deal with. I had to face them in order to realize, “These stumbling blocks are going to stop me from moving forward, regardless of how much more training I have personally.”
I wrote this book called Battling Invisible Enemies: Facing Your Inner Struggles Head On for myself. I had to talk to myself about, “What’s going on here, Jay? What’s the deal? Why do you get up in the morning and you’re in the battle already, you haven’t step one foot on the floor yet, and you’re swinging?” It took some time and I wrote this book. As I wrapped it up, I gave a copy to my brother who was a sales manager in New York for a big real estate company. He said, “Jay, you nailed it. Don’t keep this to yourself. Let’s get it out to some folks.” Of course, my wife helped me publish my material. We got it out there. Every person who’s read it whether in sales or not, they could have a job that requires a better performance of them. They’ve all said, “This has met us exactly where we were at. We’re struggling with these invisible enemies.” It’s become my bestseller by far because it’s dealing where people are. In ’21 after a year of ’20, a book like this is needed more now than ever.
The most ambitious people have the greatest battles. Share on XI’ve devoted a lot of episodes and my posts online to the mental health of sales and sales management functions. A lot of companies still did well in 2020. They’re looking decent in 2021, but to me, there’s an underwriting churn that’s happening because of all the stuff that’s happened. A little uncertainty and the ground beneath their feet has been shaken a little bit. I would anticipate your book being even a bigger seller in 2021. You didn’t say you were reluctant to publish it, but you had some thoughts about, “Is this going to be accepted? Is this what the world wants?” Of course it is, but tell me about some of that resistance.
I understand entertainment. I’ve been in the entertainment world. If you are going to be asked to speak in front of a group, especially in a peak performance setting, top-sales professionals in a format where there’s a lot of inspiration and motivation, the last thing they want the speaker to talk about is the guy who is struggling with depression, discouragement, doubt, anxiety, and stress. These aren’t sexy topics. No one walks out of there fired up. This is one of those books where the person who will read it probably won’t let anyone know that they’re reading it. You are not going to find a guy in the office reading this before morning before he makes his calls. It’s one of this under-the-radar, on-the-ground books.
It’s like what we used to do with Playboy magazine. We would hide it somewhere. That’s what your readers would do.
We know it’s there. We’ll go back to get it, but don’t let anyone see us reading it.
We laugh but I know high achievers, $500,000 and $1 million people who still struggle with this stuff. It has very little to do with financial success. E.E. Cummings said, “Be kind to people because you never know what battle they’re fighting inside.” I’ve seen people who are million-dollar earners fight huge battles inside. Sometimes it’s impostor syndrome, out of their comfort zone, or they don’t feel deserving. We all have battles.
There’s no question about it, we’re humans. One of the things that I talk a lot about in my talks and my videos when I get a chance to get on stage, I’m a very real person. I don’t speak in Pollyanna. I’m not highfalutin in a way that I have to be so impressive that you lose your sense of humanity. I tell folks, “Whether you realize it or not, we’re formed with the same organics and chemicals. We breathe the same air. We have the same bone structure. We have the same infrastructure. We have the same brain in terms of a left hemisphere and right hemisphere. We’re the same.”
What separates us is usually our environment, but not even that much because if you looked at my environment, you would say, “That guy has got a future that is probably going to end up somewhere behind bars or in the corner office with a green outfit and the broom.” It’s not about your environment. It’s about what you make and the experiences that those decisions bring forth. A lot of bad decisions and experiences is going to foster what I call the downward spiral. I wrote about that in the book, “The downward spiral is where you get caught into the spiral of worry. It leads to stress, anxiety and fear. Now, you’re on your way down to doubt, disbelief, discouragement, and depression.” It can happen to anybody in a split moment.
It’s a cycle that can take you down quickly unless you are practicing some serious self-reflection or self-awareness mindfulness or whatever you want to call it. We are so busy and reluctant to spend any time with ourselves. As you said, you had a lot of one-on-one talks with yourself when you were going through some of this, and this is what came from it. Something came from it that’s going to help a lot of people.
The most ambitious people have the greatest battles. The folks who are at $2 million, $3 million or $5 million a year of production or income, higher or greater, got there because they’re highly ambitious and highly-driven people. It’s almost like a double-edged sword. The higher your ambition and the more you’re driven, the chances are the greater the battle because you’re always striving for that next best version of yourself. Internally, even though you’ve done well, you still struggle with, “Am I good enough to get there?” It’s because you’re ambitious and driven. The person who has nothing going on are not motivated. They’re living what I call a quiet life of desperation or a quiet life of settling. They aren’t going to battle much with enemies or struggles because they’ve got nothing that’s driving them. There are some more driven ones with a greater battle there.
Let’s get into a little bit of psychoanalyzing a salesperson or chief executive no matter what. Give me a couple of things that you think people struggle with in the context of what we talked about. It could be something specific or general. What do you see people struggle with? Let’s talk about some solutions.
Battling Inner Enemies: If you’re going to speak in a peak performance setting where there’s a lot of inspiration and motivation, the last thing they want to hear is the guy struggling with depression or discouragement.
Let me give you a very real example. My brother, I mentioned him earlier, is a successful real estate manager for a decent-sized firm in New York. He had his sales meetings on Thursday mornings. Often enough, he’ll call me the day before and he says, “Do you got anything I could share? Do you got a joke? Do you got something that I could open up my meeting with or a tip?” I always give him something, whatever I’ve got. At his first meeting of the year, he asked me for ideas and what he could introduce. The conversation evolved into him questioning and doubting whether or not his sales force sees the value that he brings them week-to-week. He questioned whether the value is perceived by his sales force or if he, himself, seen as a valuable person. It was either, “Is the content valuable? Or is he valuable to them?”
That’s a very real reflection that a lot of sales leaders face and feel. They don’t want to admit it, but I think there’s a lot of that.
You’re correct. I was at a meeting, and the gentleman of that company, very successful in financial services, was echoing the same thing. He’s got a sizable sales force. I said to my brother, “One of the things to recognize is that not everybody is going to appreciate you or your efforts. That’s the world that we live in. That’s the world of sales management. It’s the way that it is, but they have to respect, if nothing else, your time. Do they understand the time that you put into preparing? Do they value it? Do they respect it? What kind of return do you think you can get from them if they did? If they valued, understood and respected the time that you put in, forget about the content and you, the time and the effort. If you have them or you can help them, understand that whether or not it’s the content they find valuable or they find you valuable, at least respect the time. That helped him feel better. He was at a place where he started to feel doubtful and that helped him get through a little bit about the stumbling block.
That’s good because self-doubt creeps in. Self-doubt and fear can come visit your mind but don’t let them take up residency. Sometimes they do and we don’t even know it. We start to doubt everything we do, whether it’s a podcast, sales call or building our business plan, “Is this enough? It sounds like a lot. I don’t know if I can do that.” Self-doubt enslaves us sometimes and we don’t even know it.
It’s disempowering. By the way, if you carry self-doubt on your face, other people will see it. I used to tell one of my young directors of our company, “Do you believe in what you’re saying?” He said, “Absolutely.” I said, “Will you tell your face?” It was like, “I don’t believe what you’re saying.”
We all think we’re clever enough to hide it but we don’t. Give me another struggle. You talked about the context of a sales manager but the thing about the mental and emotional sides of achievement that you find people struggle with. I want to ask you a question about potential and how we help people get to their potential. What’s another one?
Let me give you something that’s close to your answer. I think you’ll see why I say that. I put out a video called The Struggle. This is what the entrepreneurs, professionals, sales pros and even directors struggle with. I did a tongue-in-cheek and said, “The struggle of EDD.” Most people in that video, when I put the acronym EDD, they figured out, “That’s erectile dysfunction.” When I opened up the video I said, “It’s not what you think. I’m not talking about that struggle. That’s not the struggle.” I said, “EDD is Entrepreneurial Delusion Disorder.” Every salesperson, sales manager struggles, and entrepreneur struggles with. It’s where you deceive yourself to thinking that you’re doing all you can. You get into this place that you are convincing no one else but yourself. You’re doing all you can. You’re performing at your best. You’re giving it all you’ve got. You’re fully committed. You’re fully in. There’s nothing else you need to learn. You’re good. All is well. That’s delusional.
One of the things that I always talk to people about is, “Let’s address this EDD and see if you’re struggling with it because the symptoms if I’m looking at them, you’ve got EDD. Your numbers don’t reflect how confident you are about your performance. You don’t show up to any training. That means you think you know it all. You’re not willing to learn more so that means you’ve got an issue with pride. Those are all symptoms of EDD.” There’s a whole talk I gave on that, which was funny. It addresses what I think hurts more organizations, which is having too much people run around with EDD. It certainly hurts the individual themselves unless it’s pointed out, just like any disease.
The higher your ambition, the more you're driven and, chances are, the greater the battle. Share on XWe all get defensive. As a trainer and somebody goes into companies, business-to-business sales teams and works with them, the first question I always ask is, “What’s not working? Where can it be better? What’s working maybe 50% but not working all the way?” Sometimes it’s a struggle for people to come up with it because we live inside our own soul all day long. We don’t see ourselves the way others see us. All we know are the positive things and there’s always room for growth. There’s always something you could be doing even slightly better. I’m not talking about working an extra four hours a day. I’m talking about slight variations in language, technique, and strategy. I love that EDD. We all have it. Jay, how can people get your book and follow you online? If you have a social media presence, tell us how we can follow you.
A number of ways. You could visit my website, which is TheJayMaymi.com. You could also look at my show website, TheJayMaymiTalkShow.com. I’m on YouTube, google The Jay Maymi. You can find my training YouTube channel, which is Survive to Thrive. I have tons of videos on there on prospecting and mindset. I also have my Facebook page at The Jay Maymi.
If people go to TheJayMaymi.com, they can find all the other channels from there, correct?
All my goodies would be on there.
Jay, it’s been a pleasure to get to know you. I hope this will be valuable for you. We’re going to get it out here. I think this topic is extremely relevant all the time, but especially right now. I appreciate you spending time talking to us.
I appreciate you inviting me. I hope it helps someone.
Thanks, Jay.
There is an advantage to growing up in a humble setting with meager means. The reality of your circumstances can either pummel you into mediocrity or extract from you a burning desire to excel and rise above. My story is one of the latter. For the last three decades my hunger to rise above has yielded an impressive array of accomplishments. From multiple successful businesses to bodybuilding championships, radio, TV, stage, and print work to authoring 5 books; from an entire Sales and Personal Development series to speaking in front of many diverse audiences on different topics; all have uniquely qualified me to offer valuable knowledge, instruction, inspiration, and impact to those seeking to develop a higher and greater expression of themselves. Whether you are visiting my site for personal development, sales training, performance mentoring, or simply to be inspired, I welcome you and am thankful you have decided to take a look.
In this follow-up episode, Bill Caskey jumps right back into how experts mislead us as he talks about the lies the experts tell us. He focuses on challenging beliefs and the importance of taking a second look at the teachings in your life that you thought to be true. Get to know five other ways that experts are misleading you. Learn what trainers and coaches usually focus on that are contrary to the critical components needed for your success. Tune in so you can stay away from the lies the experts are telling you.
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I’m glad you are here. We’re going to do part two of our lies, myths and misgivings. Things that you’ve been taught and instructed to do by sales trainers and coaches over the years that no longer work or there’s a better way. If you didn’t read part one, no problem. Go ahead and read this, then you can go back. I gave you five. Number one, if you would ask better questions, the customer is going to be more likely to buy. That’s a lie. Number two, work harder, mind and grind longer. Work your tail off and you’ll succeed. I’m not saying that work ethic is not good but that’s not a recipe for success. Number three, it’s all about the numbers. Make more calls and sales. Number four, don’t worry about your personal brand. Who do you think you are? The company has a brand. That’s good enough. Number five, don’t worry about scaling your business. Let me, as your leader or manager, and that’s what the sales trainer would say is, “Don’t worry about scaling. You go out and hammer outcalls one at a time, you’ll be successful.”
From reading this blog, there are better ways to solve problems. I want to give you five more and some solutions around these. If you like any of those five and you didn’t read the prior show, go back and read to it. I give you some solutions there. We’re continuing from the past episode. I got a lot of these from LinkedIn and I want to acknowledge all of the people on LinkedIn who shared their ideas with me. I’ve got 35 to 40 comments and had good conversations with some of you. I’m going to mention a couple of you here.
The trainer and coach don’t pay much attention to your mindset. They’re all about production and behavior. We used to talk a lot about behavior. What are your sales behavior and activities? Not a word was mentioned about, how do you feel about that? What’s your mindset going into that behavior? The mindset on the way into the behavior will determine the behavior and the effectiveness of it. I find that most trainers stay away from mindset or they’ll give you some lousy thing like, “Be more confident and abundant.” I talk about abundance but I would never say to someone, “Be more abundant. You need to ratchet up your abundance thinking.” That isn’t helpful.
The mindset on the way into the behavior will determine the behavior. Share on XThe question is, “How do I do that?” Mindset is a critical component. If you’ve ever witnessed yourself, and it’s hard to witness yourself sometimes, in a slump or everything you touch turns to what things aren’t working in the market. It’s probably got something to do with your mindset, your emotions, and your perspective of the world has changed. When you’re on a high and everything you touch turns to gold, you’re like Goldfinger in the old James Bond series, then you want to make calls and go out because you’re attractive. That’s all about mindset. It’s not about behavior. Behavior is influenced by mindset, but you got to take special care of your mind. What are you putting into it? How are you feeding it? What do you do with it during the day? Do you let it run willy-nilly across the stream of consciousness? Are you delivering to your mind things that are going to help it stay on track? Mindset is huge.
Number seven, I want to know what your numbers are. Don’t worry about the plan. Usually, sales managers and trainers sometimes will say this. I’ve heard it from trainers I’ve been involved with them over the years where I’ve collaborated with them. It becomes get clear on your goal and the rest of it will take care of itself. I do think there’s truth to the clearer and more vivid. You can imagine what your goal looks like when it’s complete. That does energize you but there still has to be a plan. Unfortunately, most sales professionals have been taught how to project-manage. That’s exactly what goal setting is. It’s developing a number out there and an ideal outcome.
Let’s say you want to generate 300,000 hours of personal income next year. You did 150,000 last year. You want to 2X. We’ve got a program for that. It’s called The2XGroup.com. To get from 150,000 to 300,000, it’s going to require some thinking through it and some fleshing out of things. I find that most coaches don’t help you do that. They’re more interested in what you want to accomplish, which is important. I’m not discounting the importance of that, but there is a how-to, “I’m here now. I want to get there tomorrow. What is the middle or bridge look like?” Project management is a critical skill. I’ve said this for the last couple of years, project management is a critical skill for sales professionals in the B2B space. Every goal, customer, initiative or project is a project.
Lies We Are Told: Position yourself appropriately in the marketplace by creating content that’s valuable for your customer base or your prospect base.
Number eight, you don’t need to be spending time creating content. You need to get out and sell. Coaches do not understand the importance of creating content on your media platform for the world to sample. By the world, I don’t mean the world, I mean the world of your prospects, your niche, your audience, whatever you want to call the people who would get value out of reading, consuming, watching, listening, whatever that content is. I don’t think coaches and trainers spend nearly enough time teaching you the theory of content marketing. Content marketing came along a few years ago and it was hot for a couple of years.
It has lost its luster and it’s coming back mainly because I believe you, as a business-to-business sales professional, need to position yourself appropriately in the marketplace. That’s why you wear the clothes, drive the car, and ask the questions. Everything is about positioning and I’m not talking about faking it. I’m not talking about the Instagram influencer faking its positioning. I’m talking about positioning yourself. The way you position yourself is you create content that’s valuable for your customer-base or your prospect-base. That might mean writing an article a week on LinkedIn at a minimum. It could be shooting a video once a week for LinkedIn. I’ve got a couple of clients who shoot them 2 or 3 times a week.
Every time they post one, they title it. They get to test the market to see what the market wants. Don’t let people talk you into, “Your job is to sell.” Here’s what happens if you create content. You create an article, you title it with something that’s relevant to your prospects, take one of the top problems your prospect has. Let’s say you’re in the commercial real estate business. A potential prospect might be asking him or herself, “Should I buy a building, lease a building or lease space?” I don’t know whatever that is. That’s a decision. Why don’t you write an article called, Should I buy a building or should I lease space? A question every business owner should be asking or something like that. When people come across that article, they’re in the same town you are, they start to read your profile, and they say, “That’s a good question. I’m going to have John come in here and talk to us.” You get the call. You had no idea this person was looking. You can’t buy a list of people necessarily. Maybe in the real estate business you can, who are looking. Somebody has found you because you have delivered content. That’s valuable to them.
90% of buyers want to feel safe in their business and in your presence. Share on XNumber nine, we don’t spend enough time addressing the psychology of the buyer. There was a trend in the ‘80s and ‘90s talking about buyer psychology. It seems like we went very quickly to seller psychology. We love the psychology topic, but we went quickly to what’s the psychology of the seller. Brian Tracy even wrote an audio recording set called The Psychology of Selling. We got very interested in that. I liked that. You need to be studying both the psychology of the buyer and the psychology of yourself. We talk a lot about it in this show. Your own mindset, ethos, your soul, and how your energy can rise and fall based on how you think about things. Don’t forget about the buyer. Here’s one thing that you need to know about buyer psychology. This goes for any buyer. Not every buyer might but 90% of the buyers want to feel safe in their business and your presence. When you show up and you are eager, enthusiastic, you’re pitching and you’re closing from the time you walk in the room, that does not make people feel safe.
I know some of you sellers who have become so good at that. It has become so much a part of you. You say, “How can I unhook myself from that?” You’re going to have to because I’ll bet you, you’ve lost sales where you have been too eager and you didn’t condition the environment for the prospect to feel safe. You can still be yourself and do that. We call it the up-front agreement or the setting of the tone up-front. You’ve got to make sure that when you walk into the room, whether the room is virtual or physical, you create an environment for safety. Safe environments sell. It allows the prospect to tell you more about what their issues are or it allows you to move forward with freedom where you’re not constantly thinking, “When is he going to object? How am I going to close? When should I throw the money section out?” You’re not doing that because you’ve created this environment where two people are having a human conversation. I believe that’s important for buyer psychology. You’ve got to pay attention to it.
Number ten, people will shy you away from personal marketing. I know we talk about branding we have but I’m talking about personal marketing. What is your personal marketing plan? I haven’t seen any trainers talk about this. They talk about making cold calls, outreach and going to networking events. There’s more to marketing than that. That’s more sales stuff. I want marketing. I want to know are you doing a webinar? Have you written a white paper or some kind of a free report or a lead magnet as it’s called in the internet marketing world? Something that is enticing enough for a prospect that they would give you their name and email address to download it because they know that there’s something on the other side that would be valuable for them.
That’s the essence of marketing now. It’s giving something away, getting their email address, and then sharing other tidbits, tips, tactics and strategies along the way through email. You have a lot more power when you have an email address than you do when you have a social media connection. I’m not against social media connections, but email is still the killer app. It probably will be for a while and maybe text, but at least email. What are you doing in your personal marketing to capture email addresses from people who have an interest in what it is you do, you say, you produce, and how you bring value to people? If cold calls are your only outreach, then you’re making a huge mistake. You’re undervaluing yourself. You can do better than that.
Read up a little bit on lead magnets. Try to figure out, “What kind of marketing steps can I take?” Maybe you want to have a YouTube channel or record a Q&A every Friday of some of the things that you heard in your market over the week and post them up on LinkedIn, YouTube or the video sites. That’s marketing for you. We’ve got to think about marketing in terms of educating our prospects so that they come back and reach out to us. I’ve talked about the lead Parthenon before and we can talk about it in subsequent episodes. The idea with that is you have a Parthenon, you’ve got 5 to 7 pillars of leads coming in. Some of those may be outbound where you’re making a call going to an event. Some of those we want to be inbound.
I would say, if you don’t have any inbound leads, then you need to start focusing on that because that’s what’s going to help you scale your business. I also casually slipped in The 2X Group. If you have any interest at all and be a part of a small group coaching program, the fees are nominal and the value is extreme. We meet twice a month. If you’re interested in that, you can go to The2XGroup.com, jump on a call with me, and tell me a little bit about what you want to accomplish. We’ll see if it could be a fit for you. See you next time. Bye.