I get this question a lot from people: “How do I find a good coach — and what strategies should a coach use to help me grow?”
In this week’s episode, I address the three must-have elements that a good coach should possess to help you get past your limiting beliefs and grow your business.
If you’re interested in taking part in a LIVE COACHING session for High Achievers, go to https://resources.billcaskey.com/high-achievers to save your spot now!
On this episode of The Bill Caskey Podcast, Bill talks with Alan Allard, author of ‘Seven Secrets to Enlightened Happiness.’
Alan is an expert in elite sales performance and he shares some incredible insights on how to find fulfillment in your life and career.
To learn more about Alan and his book, go to https://www.alanallard.com.
When was the last time you took a look at your email signature line?
On this episode, Bill discusses the importance of having a proper signature line in all your emails. He gives you some ways you can improve signature which could possibly improve you business.
If you’d like to be a part of the next LIVE Coaching Session, go to https://resources.billcaskey.com/high-achievers to save your spot now!
On this episode, Bill takes a listener question from Jonathan who is feeling a lack of clarity in his career.
Bill gives him several areas to work through to become on his goals and purpose.
If you’d like to be a part of the next LIVE Coaching Session, Thursday April 1st, go to https://resources.billcaskey.com/high-achievers to save your spot now!
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.
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.