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The world's best conversations about B2B selling happen here. This exciting new podcast from Andy Paul, the creator and host of the Sales Enablement Podcast (with 1200+ episodes and millions of downloads) is focused on the mission of helping increase your win rates by winning a bigger percentage of the deals in your pipeline. In this unique round table format, Andy and his panel of guest experts share the critical sales insights, sales perspectives and selling skills that you can use to elevate your sales effectiveness and create the buying experiences that influence decision-makers to buy from you. Host Andy Paul is the expert on modern B2B selling and author of three best-selling, award-winning sales books, including his latest Sell Without Selling Out. Visit andypaul.com to subscribe to his newsletter for even more strategies and tips to accelerate your win rate!
Hi friends. Welcome to the WinRate Podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. That was Duan Brown. And Duan is one of my guests on this episode of the WinRate Podcast. Duan Brown is the head of sales at Merit American. And my other guests today for this discussion about sales effectiveness and increasing win rates are Sean Shepard.
Sean is managing partner at You Plus and Sherry Levitin is the CEO of Sherry Levitin Group and author of A really excellent book titled heart and sell 10 universal truths. Every salesperson needs to know. Now, before we jump into today's discussion, I just want to let you know that if you have any questions about B2B selling sales effectiveness or how to increase your win rates that you'd like to have addressed by either me or one of my guests on this podcast, then you can submit those questions to us via email at win rate podcast at gmail.
com or you can DM them to me. Andy Paul on LinkedIn. So I'd love to hear your questions. If you're ready, let's jump into the discussion.
Okay, friends, that's it for this episode of The WinRate Podcast. First of all, I want to thank you for taking the time to listen. I'm so grateful for your support of the show. And I want to thank my guests, Sean Shepard, DeJuan Brown, and Sherry Levitin, for sharing their wisdom with us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast, The WinRate Podcast with Andy Paul, on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
And also, before you go, don't forget, Subscribe to my newsletter win rate Wednesday, every Wednesday, you get one actionable or at least one actionable tip to help you increase your win rates delivered right to your inbox. You can subscribe at my website, andypaul. com or at LinkedIn. So again, thank you so much for investing your time with me today.
Until next time, I'm your host, Andy Paul, good selling everyone.
Welcome, everyone. And I want to welcome Sherry Levitin, Sean Shepard, DeJuan Brown to the show. So, if you could, let's also go in order. And if you guys just spend a minute giving a brief introduction to yourself.
Sherry, we'll start with you.
Whenever anybody asks that, I'm thinking I need to have like the elevator speech that clicks, right? So, but companies hire me who really, I do three different things. Our company does just three different things. Number one, I'm a keynote speaker, so I do a lot of sales kickoffs. Our biggest topic right now is How to re humanize the sales process in the wake of chat.
GPT and Alexa. So we need to do everything Alexa can't do in order to connect with our customers. We also have a training and consulting division. We jokingly call our keynotes a one night stand. We prefer to work deeper with clients and make an impact. So we help them scale their systems. Increase their revenue by working with each level of leadership within the organization.
And then the third thing we do is we have train the trainer programs where we train enablement professionals and leaders and we certify them in our methodology called the four pillars of an effective training and coaching program. And other than that live in Park City, love to ski, hike, stand on my head do fun things.
All right. If I'd known that, we would have we had you share the standing on your head bit. So, Sean, how about you?
Yeah, Sean Shepard serial tech entrepreneur, sales founder three exits, three venture funds the world's first product market accelerator called GrowthX, and then the first school to train people in sales roles to work in Silicon Valley GrowthX Academy. Always been passionate about sales and upskilling and and professionalizing the industry.
Nobody grows up saying I want to be in sales. They both be doctors, lawyers or accountants. Yet without sales and professional salespeople, nothing ever happens in commerce. And I think it's I think it's tremendously undervalued. And so I always enjoy these conversations with you and what I do to support the industry.
And Duann,
. DeJuan Brown. I am just a serial seller for the last 22 years sales leadership. Zero exits, zero funds, zero headstands but one wife and six kids. I'm currently the head of sales for a national nonprofit called Merit America where our primary mission is to change who gets access to economic opportunity in the U.
S. and how.
So tell us how you got into that. Because , you started your career with like Intuit and then
you were at Bloomberg You work for all these big companies. So, who had already exited by the way, but very impressive. You're working for them. So what sort of got you down this path?
Yeah, I think the mission itself is one that I've been running towards since I got into sales. So I was dragged into sales after having my first son not having to, but leaving college to raise him. I'm trying to figure out what is a family sustaining wage look like when I don't have a degree.
And. Got dragged in over the course of a year, applied it into it, got into it, stayed there 12 and a half years. And since then, like seeing the trajectory change for my family and myself, I've been trying to figure out ways to do that for others. I can't scale it because I always had to do it outside of my nine to five.
And so when I came across merit, it's just like. I consider it my icky guy, right? It's like what the world needs, what I'm passionate about, what I can get paid for. It's super mission to do the same. So I am actually the profile of our learners and our alumni at Merritt who transitioned from, in some cases, in a lot of cases, low wage work.
Into tech through alternative methods and means. And so, and we're one of those, methods and means. And so I'm just extremely passionate about it because I've always been, since I've benefited from someone seeing something deeper in me. Understanding aptitude and attitude have trumped a lot of things that were required in the roles I wanted and now I get to pursue that at scale full time.
Our mission is a billion dollars in wage change by 2025 and to begin serving over 10, 000 learners a year.
Very impressive. Fair. And that's based where?
We're all remote our founders met them, met each other years ago at Coursera. And we have a large swath of our population in terms of employees in DC, but we're all over the place, all over the country.
it. Very exciting. That's quite a pivot. I love that.
Yeah. I
It's like To be I mean It's a question because I've never really I mean I've been passionate about what I do I've really enjoyed with the work I've done but you know quite honestly never felt like it was I was saving the world or fundamentally changed the world doing it
Yeah.
How's it feel different like when you wake up every morning?
It, it feels like, there's this angst, right? So sometimes you're in a full time role and you like it to your description, you enjoy it. It's good work. But most of us, when we reach, and I'll talk about it in the terms, this is me and Jack Wilson have probably spent a hundred hours talking about this.
But when you think about Maslow's hierarchy, like you get to a place of self actualization, that's not like, boom, I'm done. But. If you turn that pyramid on its side, like it's almost like a bullhorn and you start to transition to really trying to reach others. And the only thing that keeps you from reaching more is typically time and resources, right?
But you're trying all along. And so if you can align what you're trying to do on the side and who you're trying to reach and who you're trying to impact to help them go through their hierarchy. Then you take it if resources and time weren't restricted. And so moving into a role like this, resources and time aren't restricted because that is my job.
And so you might imagine what that feels like every morning waking up doing that thing. And that's how I feel.
Love it. Love it. All right, well, all right, we're gonna jump into our That was my regular topic, but I love what you're doing. Congratulations on that. All right, Sean, we're gonna start with you. Is actually, yeah, we're gonna change up a little bit. I had Sean first sharing a TFU a little bit first, actually. I did have without knowing you were gonna make your comment about What you're talking about in terms of how you humanize the selling processes. So let's start there. What is the impact you think AI is going to have on this ability to, for sellers to create these differentiated sort of human based buying experiences?
Are you asking Sean? Are you asking
I'm asking you Sherry. Did I say Sean? I meant Sherry. I'm
Oh, okay.
I meant Sherry.
No problem. I think, for a long time, if you look at the landscape certainly generationally, Sherry Turkle tells us that as technology use has increased, Empathy, the number one skill sellers need has decreased by over 40 percent and what I see with the clients we work with and we're working with Microsoft and Dell and then we're also working with people in home improvement.
So sort of across the spectrum and whether they're selling tech or they're selling kitchens or real estate, one of the things that we still see And it's hard to believe is sellers leading with products instead of building relationships. You've got sellers blurting out what their products do and instead of really trying to understand the needs of the customer.
I think ChatGPT is really exciting to me and AI is really exciting to me. We do have to understand it's not going to replace what has always been. And that is, if you look at sort of the, I love to do this in my seminars. I say. We all learned in Sales 101 that there's two things you need in order to make a sale.
Duann you'll love this. It's, you need your competency, you need to know your products, and you need your empathy, you need to know your customer. And then I'll say, if you only had one, and you had to decide competency or empathy, which would you decide? You only get one. And the rooms usually split, right?
And the thing is, it's a trick question. Because what Harvard Business Review tells us, and there's a great article called First Connect Then Lead, is that empathy and competency are the two most important traits. that you need in order to sell. But the order matters and empathy gets you in the door. It's competency, reliability and integrity that keep you there, that I call that the four elements of trust.
And so sellers continue to lead with competency. AI gives us competency in spades. We can look up anything. We can find out anything in seconds. Now it's amazing, but it never replaces that empathy. Now with that said. There's many places that I've been playing with chat GPT, whether it's doing research, whether it's helping with proposals.
But I think it's not going to really replace that connection in a complex B to B sale, that connection in a complex B to B sale.
Yeah, so I mean that, that aspect of it certainly is reinforced by, most recently by Gartner. They put out this, published some of the charts from one of their latest studies and they said, Hey, here are the nine most important factors that influence a buyer's decision. And Yeah, six or seven of the nine specifically were this experiential thing, right?
How the buyer experiences working with the seller. But this is a lesson that still seems to elude companies, sellers, if you will. And I thought it was really, Gardner did a great job of sort of, drawing the contrast to it. Because as you said, Sherry is what Gardner is saying is, look. Everybody's selling a product, the buyer is choosing a vendor, right?
One is just, yeah, as your point, demonstrate competence, but the buyer wants that, that experience. They want that empathy. They need that connection. And
you need a seller to build consensus, which Gartner talks about all the time, right? That's the biggest challenge. How do you get 11 stakeholders to agree on anything? So, you've got to have that understanding. You've got to have the strategic thinking. You've got to be able to play psychologist.
And I just find in enablement that they're just not teaching that they're teaching all of these product lines that you have to learn. And I always say what happens in the Right. Training process is duplicated in the sales process. Then we just give him too much information.
Yeah. Sean, what's your take on that?
Well, I 100 percent agree in the age of A. I. E. I. Is more important than it's ever been. And in I've always chosen technology as a field to apply my craft because I love the leverage that technology creates, right? While I was talking about, I'm one person, I can only do so much.
So how do you turn that pyramid on its side? Get a blow horn? Well, you can leverage things like capital, you can leverage people, you can leverage technology, you can leverage media and so I've always loved what technology can do to scale for good, technology for good means it advances human performance.
It doesn't replace human performance in its entirety, but it does advance it, right? So, for example, we just launched at Uplus, my company, which builds startups for big corporations, we launched a Venture Discovery AI project. Platform that takes this three month professional service that used to sell between a grand come up with five business model ideas you could test in the market, and it does it in an hour. Okay, so we're cannibalizing our business. No, I don't believe so. But what we are doing is we're just accelerating the path to the outcomes that the customer wants with leveraging these tools. It still means you need humans. It's still a managed service. It is not, and I don't think it will ever be a quote unquote SaaS product that's completely self service.
Not until people have the context and the experience and the right set of behaviors and mindset to apply it correctly. But what it does do is it accelerates it. Because otherwise a fool is what a tool is still a fool. And so, I agree with the entire, let's say, current premise that we've always under emphasized the humanity of the work that we do. And everything that's centered in and around that humanity. And I 100 percent agree with Sherry that empathy gets you in the door. Compassion keeps you in the door. You've got to build and create those relationships. You have to be a critical thinker, a problem solver. You've got to have strong business and market acting, and you've got to be able to communicate well, and you've got to have strong emotional intelligence, if you don't have those things, and again, why do they call them soft skills when they're the hardest to master, but that's what they're called it's ridiculous.
But those are the skills that I think the best professional sellers need to continue to focus on and develop themselves around. And you don't get that necessarily from sales specific industry content, right? You get that from out the outside world, human behaviorists, anthropologists, researchers business humanity, social sciences places that aren't necessarily right down the swim lane of sales.
And so I would I just would encourage people to expand their horizons and look to as many sources as they possibly can to improve not just their knowledge, but their skills and most importantly, their behaviors. And I think start, the first step in emotional intelligence is self awareness. And I don't think, I think we, not to get, socio or political here, but it feels like over time we've had less and less.
We're less and less held accountable for our lack of self awareness. And therefore we're not aware that we're not self aware. And I see people being very self centric and very product centric and very company centric and very system centric in their approaches to trying to sell anything at scale.
And all of those things are designed to protect themselves and not do what's in the best interest of the customer.
Right.
small groups tend to do very well in trying different things or doing some of the things that we talk about, or individuals. But systematically at scale, it's very difficult. To to create that kind of a culture,
So how do we do that? Dewan, if that was up to you and you had to start with you and get back, Sean is. How do we start, affecting this type of change in sales? Because here we're all sort of in violent agreement that what's most important. Yet, when we look at sort of the results in the business and the industry and they show, a different path is, seller buyers are still hugely frustrated with the experience.
We're going to sellers, 75 percent claim they'd rather do it on their own rather than talk to a salesperson, the yada yada, yada. How do we begin to actually make change in this?
I think it's a great question. Part of my knee jerk responses. If that is the, if that is the truth that, 70 something percent of buyers are frustrated with the seller process and that we know that human centric selling and focusing on the buyer themselves, their problems, how big the problem is, the impact of the problem across their business.
If we know that those are the better routes and those , over time yield the best outcomes, then. For some reason, it would seem like , there comes a point when those doing it the other way can't succeed in the market. , but I don't know if that's what's happening, right? I think over time, what we do see is that.
As buyers become frustrated and start to voice some of those frustrations, more people start to figure out like, what is the alternative to this? Some of the things that have been said by Sherry, some of the things that have been said by Sean is just like, and this is not, I'm not, I'm going to go back into some of the AI stuff too, but. Ultimately, like long term, it doesn't work. It's just like fear and guilt versus like love and grace, right? Both affect change. Both are very effective. , two of those in perpetuity, two of those very temporarily, right? And so I think that as we look at sellers who desire to be in this In their career for a long time there's a lot of demarcation, right?
That's going to take you so far and it's not going to take you further. How do I get further? That's the transition you need to make in order to actually affect that sort of change. So, That's a lot to say that the way that we start to affect change is to in some ways we wait for the line of demarcation to occur because it will, it has to and in other ways we coach, we lead, we train, we lead by example, we show the results and the outcomes of the right, we and those who are, who want to see those sorts of results will start to ask the question, how do I actually develop this empathy? How do I actually grow in my concern and curiosity and care for the business that I'm serving versus this inward flow? And this inward look and selfish look.
How I can get to what I need. And so,
you're saying
though,
be, yeah, go ahead.
You're painting this picture. I'll throw this out to Sharon. Sean as well as is that it has to come from the individual, right? You're paying a picture of the individual taking responsibility, changing yet the cultures within so many sales organizations, driven by activity metrics and, the things that really legislate against sellers focusing on developing these types of, human experiences for buying, positive buying experiences for their prospects.
That's what
the tide is turning, right? Like, you, you wrote a wonderful book, right? That speaks to some of these things. And so as the tide turns And we start to, like, what is a lot of the discussion that's right now in the interwebs and the linked in a sphere on a regular basis.
We see things about burnout. We see things about mental health. We think we see things about psychological safety. We see things about what real leadership does versus what real leadership doesn't like. It's a big conversation and individuals inside of the organizations and inside of the machines that continue to drive that old way are waking up in droves.
I believe, and as that happens, There's new traps sparking up all over the place and I see some companies suffering because of it and it's an economic hit to organizations and cultures who maintain sort of that driving metrics. It's about this drive the number get the revenue at all costs. Yes, it's about the customer but it's mostly about us like that's just not, it's not, I don't see that as persisting in popularity for much longer.
And maybe I'm an optimist.
No, it's good to be an optimist.
You have to be here in sales.
yeah, I'm glad there's some optimism out there,
but I mean, sharing your
your throat.
right,
Yeah,
so, sharing your book heart and sell, which I love the book. Very much about the human centric approach to selling. I'm sort of curious, you're talking about you working with large organizations that sometimes seem like maybe suffer from the status quo, perhaps more than others.
What are you seeing in your work with, some of the big organizations you mentioned in terms of bringing this sort of human first approach to selling?
Look that I'm only seeing the people that want to do that because they're the ones who come to me, right? And then those are the ones that I'm going to attract. I was thinking something very clearly, though, listening to the one talk. And, I don't know if y'all notice, but when to one started on this call, with his mission.
I don't know about you, but I felt something in my body. I think when there's a sense of purpose and a mission We feel it. And I remember I was at Dreamforce maybe three or four years ago, and I met a kid, he was probably 30 named Sean, and I asked him, he was like one of the top SDRs, they all are, right, and, but I asked him why he was there, and it was so interesting, he said, I really wanted to be in a non profit, I really wanted to change the world, I really wanted to help global warming, but then I found Salesforce.
I'm like, Okay, he said, Do you know that Benny off is giving this much money to the homeless population? So every time I write a deal, I am helping homeless people. And I thought, that's unbelievable. So when we talk about changing and getting people to have a more consumer centric, a more humanistic approach, as Dewan was talking, I was jotting down.
Maybe it's the three M's and I was just thinking this while you were talking, I think in order to affect change first, there's got to be a mission that is so strong at the top that it is contagious and you are going to attract those types of people and you have to hire for people that have that mission and share those values like yes, the skills need to be there.
That goes without saying there's plenty of skilled people out there. But do they agree with your mission in your vision? So that's where it starts. Second is modeling. And DeJuan, you said something about we need to lead by example. So the only way there's going to be change is if the leaders are modeling that behavior and having success.
Because as I said before, what happens in the training and coaching process will be duplicated in the sales process. So we have to have these strong role models. So any sellers that are listening to this, it's what Marcus Buckingham said. People don't leave companies, they leave managers. You've got to pick a great manager and a great leader.
It's not, Ooh, I'm working for Salesforce. It's Ooh, I'm working for Sean Shepard. He's going to teach me something. And so you've got to be really careful who you choose to be led by because that's going to determine it. The human you become in the process. And then the third M I have mission modeling and then mastery and to be proficient in anything.
It takes mastery, which is constant learning and development. And Carol Dweck, of course, talks about it, that you've got to have a growth mindset. And I think today, more than ever, whether it's ChatGPT or whether it's learning new products, new methods, new ways of reaching people, Omnichannel we've got to be open, not only to learn, but to unlearn things we thought we knew.
And so I believe that those three elements, those three M's that you inspired me to think of, Dewan, is what it's going to take in order to really see change.
You know I just want to say this real quick is I love that you went there, especially with the first M of Mission because, my post on, I had a post on LinkedIn a day that was just a flashback to when I first heard Simon Sinek start with why the golden circle and it was like 2009 ish when one of my colleagues that have you ever heard the golden circle?
He sent the video to me and it literally changed my life. People don't buy what you do. They buy why you do it. And that alignment with mission from the top. Like you said, you're going to see some of the successes of those who are empathetic leaders at the top, trickle down through the organization.
And hopefully that's going to draw those people who believe the same, right? Belief statements are super powerful in life, but especially in sales, as we think about alignment with the, with our buyers,
Go ahead, Cherry.
No, I was just going to say, and I think especially the higher up you go, when you're talking to the C suite, they've heard every product pitch under the sun. And they all start sounding the same, right? It's very hard to differentiate at some point, and I just find that the higher up you go, the more that you talk about the why your company does what they do or why we do what we do.
That's where that true connection happens at a very deep level.
absolutely.
All right, Sean.
well, I think, how do you create the change? Around what we talked about. I think it always starts where most of these things starts. It starts with leadership, whether that's in the classroom from a very young age all the way through, as you matriculate through your education and conditioned by society in certain ways around certain social norms and fixed ideas that have been around forever.
Right? I still think in the sales world, we still think the world is flat in some ways. Yeah. So there's that. I also think it happened. It exists with sales leadership itself. And to be fair, I think a lot of what drives these behaviors in sales talk that we talk about is with the context of technology sales, because there's this promise of scale once again, that drives the behaviors of an organization and everyone in it. I have a lot of very good friends with very successful sales very successful salespeople or businesses that are very relationship and empathy oriented that are not technology related. I have a very good friend who has the largest commercial drywall construction company on the West Coast.
He's been monstrously successful. And you know what his salespeople do all day? Take the guys out, play golf go to events, entertain. Just talk, and they know each other's families, and they have for 30 years, their best friends and it's not a good old boy network per se, but that's the nature of the industry they're in.
Physical products and services say, on a project basis that's quite large, is a very different business model than sell and sass. And they recognize that it's all about the relationships. And you do everything you can to support and foster those relationships. And usually the last thing we're talking about is business, not the first. How's the family? How are your wife and kids? What's going on? Johnny got, a home run on Saturday. Or we're vacationing together. Very common in those kinds of worlds. But I think that's specific to, the kind of business model, right? And the product and market dynamic that exists.
In technology, we are, a lot of salespeople are viewed and relegated to being hamsters on a wheel. It's a factory mindset, just like the school systems are. The reason we use school bells to mimic factory whistles and bells. And all of that needs to be turned on its head and rethought if this is going to change.
Yeah. And I'm so glad that you said what you said, because I've had numerous conversations with a good friend of mine Jeff Bajorek, some of you may know about, about, yeah, about this very thing where we talk, he's like the one, like of all the all salespeople in the United States, do you know how small a percentage is SAS? Right there is just so happens that for me anyway, LinkedIn has sort of encased me in a world that's surrounded by methodology, philosophy structure frameworks, processes that are all about originated with and emanating from SAS and tech, but that's not the majority of the sales world.
And like you said that, I have a good friend who's like, doing extraordinarily well in an insurance, selling insurance, life insurance which is again, a very relational business. And so in some ways it's like I've seen organizations who are in what we would call legacy industries, whether that be manufacturing, whether that be in some cases, banking, whether that be insurance start to adopt certain philosophies and processes from the tech world.
To a great success in terms of efficiency function and productivity within their business. What you're saying, Sean, and I 100 percent agree with, is that potentially the SaaS world might do itself a favor and the tech world might do itself a favor by reaching back and borrowing something from that side.
As well. It's not just, Hey, we want to give you something to help you because we have it. And you don't, it's like, Hey, you also have some things that we need inside of our organizations inside of the thing that we do. And it's that relationship. It's that empathy. It's that building. It's that business, not first, but last, right?
It's family. It's all of the things that make us human doing that together in on the way to business. And that's something that I think we could all use more of in tech. Mhmm.
I've got a question for you. I think you know, you and I may have touched on this once or twice in the past, but it is to a point. Dwan was just making. We're all making about sort of behavior. What happens within tech and sass in particular. But when you look at that business model and when you look at the sales model, not the business, but when you look at the sales model and you look at the results that are generated, sure, there's some companies have succeeded, wildly, using that model.
But it's still this very tiny fraction of those companies that have really succeeded. Can we really say that model has been a success? Why is that? That's why I'm always, mystified that it seems so immune to change because you look at the numbers, you look, data on win rates and data, quota achievement and so on.
It's like, yeah this isn't working at all.
Well, it depends how you define success, and I don't want this to sound cynical, but again, if you take a step back, the bankers were successful the founders
a small number of cases,
Huh but, right, well, that's always the, you've got to have this, you've got to have your general success curve in any industry, right, only a certain number are going to be wildly successful, and then the, there's your standard distribution. But is it successful enough for the people that are in control is really the question. And is it driving the outcomes they want? And again, a lot of the people that are in control have never been in that seat, right? So they don't know what they don't know about what great looks like. Within, say, the various stages of a funnel, right? Conversion rates, et cetera. You and I have talked about this a lot in the past, right? What are the key things that could change, win rates? We all know, we, I think you and I have always agreed the qualification is in the top of the funnel. Qualification has a greater impact on the bottom of the funnel than anything else. And are you qualifying people properly and are you maintaining the proper hygiene? And are you spending your limited time, money, and resources focused on the right, in the right areas with the right people, on the right things at the right stages? And do you understand what those are and are you willing to let go if it's not the right thing, right?
Whether that's at the individual level or you're teaching that and creating operational efficiency through the right disciplines and behaviors of the individual salespeople in the organization. So no, of course, they could be a lot better. And there's a lot of reasons why, right? And I think we've touched on a ton of them here today.
And that's why you see such a broad distribution between the top individual sellers and everybody else in the team. Just like we see a broad distribution between the most successful companies and everybody else. It's all tied to whether or not people are willing to grow and learn on a continuous basis, right?
Mindset, skill set, mastery, all the things we've been talking about there.
Well, what I find interesting, and to your point specifically, I've interviewed a ton of top, really top SaaS salespeople on the show. And what's interesting is they sell typically outside the system.
Yes, they do. They're mavericks.
Mhmm.
right. And so, the managers aren't looking at that and saying, what they look at and say, well, listen to this person's phone calls.
And, look at the, the, listen to the way they're phrasing the sentence and so on, talk like that. That's missing the points. That's just a small fraction of who they are and what they do. It's these other things. It's, empathy, the way they connect, the insightful questions they ask, the curiosity, relentless curiosity. And it's like, well, let's map that part
But yeah, it's the intangibles, right? Like, when they, why does the NFL get the quarterback thing wrong all the time? Because all they work with are the physical measurables. Right? It's the intangibles. Things you can't measure. Right. Sorry, Sherry, you go ahead.
No, I just I love this conversation because, when we go into an organization and train, we're usually training for the rest, not the best because the best is out of their minds, right? Like their enigmas. And the problem is management will either try to scale them or stop them. Right. Like, oh, let's scale Jake and like Jake does everything wrong.
Jake does everything the opposite of what I tell him to do. Like, he doesn't do a discovery. He doesn't make it about them. Like Jake, just like I have seen more Jake's right.
Yep.
and they just have the it factor. And I always say to leadership. Leave Jake alone, as long as he's ethical, moral, but don't try to scale him and certainly don't stop him.
And don't have your other sellers listen in on his calls,
Not unless you can stick them
is
in a crisper. Not unless you can stick them in a crisper machine and genetically
we're using tech! Now we're using...
Now
Because... No, because look, I'm half joking, but I'm dead serious. It's the DNA, right? There's a DNA of people. So I'm the sale, I'm the startup DNA person, right? I love zero to one and I've always been great at that.
I start something, I build it to a place to where it's scaled and then I get out because now it gets boring. That's who I am. It took me a long time to learn that. And that's what I, that's the space I like to play in. So we, I call it a startup DNA. I believe that there is a sales DNA. There's an accounting DNA.
There's a doctor DNA. There are DNAs that make these people who they are that we haven't figured, quite figured out how to capture and measure yet and replicate using traditional methods.
Yeah. Or to your point is how do we identify people of that potential, if you will. Right. Because somebody brought up before I have to figure out which one of you, but it's for me, success in sales really boils down to the situation you're in. Yeah, exactly. Sure. You're talking about the M for manager, right?
Putting, finding the right manager that you're going to work for is, yeah, you see this all the time, LinkedIn or other places, sellers complaining that not able to perform to their potential managers, holding them back, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, well, go find another manager.
Go put yourself in a different situation because your success based on who you are is going to be so situational as you may work for a perfectly managers, just not the right situation. Go find the right situation.
Absolutely. Most people don't have the courage to do that, though. Right? They just don't.
Courage with a small C, but yeah, I, yeah, that was sort of me as I, I looked for bosses that scared me in a good way, right? One that I thought was going to really challenge me intellectually get me out of my comfort zone and in ways I hadn't really thought of before.
And I wanted to take on that challenge.
But you're an enigma, Andy. You're that enigma, you're that one we can't scale, we can't define, that's why you're where you are, right?
But I always thought that was.
Anomaly.
Yeah, that's right. I always thought that was the sort of the glaring fault. And I've had this conversation with Brett Adamson in the challenger sale, is that, you'd go into company and say, we want to scale challenger. We don't hire a bunch of challengers.
Like, well, we can train people to, ask these types of questions. That's not a true challenger though. The challengers are these people we're describing. It's the, they sort of have that it factor. They have this ability to insert themselves in those curiosities, driving curiosities, sort of know more and want to know more. You, you can't really train that, or can you?
The challenge the piece of challenges that I think is that can be applied across personality types, DNA types is just, is the core of it, right? What is it? Teach Taylor and take control. The teach and Taylor part I would say, Hey, teach and Taylor as you Sherry, teach and Taylor as you Sean, teach and Taylor as you Andy.
I think those are right. I think those are right frameworks to think about what some of the valuable, some of the value you can bring to a sales process. But I don't think that, I don't think that is a thing. To be scaled in and of itself as the book lays it out. I think it's descriptive, not prescriptive.
But I think as a framework that can be scaled and at least taught and how do you teach to differentiate in the context of a sales flow? How do you tailor what you've heard and what you've, what you know, and synthesize that in such a way that you bring value to the buyer.
Like, how do you do it? Right? The point is not like, do it like this. It's like, no, like you are a person with value. You have extraordinary intellect. You have a thought process that we need to learn from and we need to sort of learn, teach, learn in this context of this team. How do you do your tailoring?
How do you do your tailoring? How do you do your tailoring? Those are the parts of the challenge of SEAL that I think should be, can be foundational in like a real springboard into it being a success inside of organizations spread across. But like if you take the challenger, the book itself and you try to make people sort of acquiesce to it wholesale, then I think that's where it might break down.
Right, and you were describing a scenario where it really requires managers that can help coach people, to be able to bring this out as opposed to, yeah, making it part of a cookie cutter training program. It's a, not really, it's a challenger.
Right. Yeah. Challenger, sheriff odd challenger Shana five
Well, I think it's the point that, look, processes and frameworks and even mental models are really important. But you still have to have the emotional intelligence. And you should still allow your own personality and style to come through. and make it your own. Just like anything. At the end, we're talking about the individual seller, right? Select your
that,
I've always, and you certainly say this many times, I've probably read every sales book under the sun instead of every methodology there is, and I think they all have great things, and I'm not going to say one's better than another. If you as an organization or person want to adopt this because you feel like you understand it, it's going to make you better, great, okay?
But that's just the process, right? It's how you apply the process that creates a method that's repeatable and predictable and scalable for you. That really is what really matters. And my whole thing is to open up your mind and get outside of the well and explore the ocean and bring some of that back to the frogs in the well and learn how to use those things to apply cross functionally to your skill set.
Because ultimately, at the end of the day, what's your job? To me, a job, a salesperson's job is to help other people get what they want, right? And if you can help them get what they want, and they're successful in that, then you are the byproduct of that success. That therein is your success. So the way that Carrie's friend Sean at 30 connected.
His deal writing to helping homeless people. I connect everything I do. And I've always taught my people to connect it to the success of others. Our job selling is helping your job is to help other people get what they want. You should feel good about it. And if you can do that with integrity and and ethics, you can sleep at night, you've been successful.
Zig Ziglar, right.
Yeah, if you help enough other people get what they want in life, you'll get what you want out of life. Absolutely.
yeah.
I think that's, but this is not the culture that exists. I want to, we've, sort of beat this up a little bit. But, one story I always, I think illustrates the challenge is my previous podcast had Dawn Dieter Schmelz, who's runs the sales program at Kansas State University.
One of the first undergraduate selling programs and very interesting conversation with Dawn. And she was talking about when she teaches her first introduction to professional selling class. And this is, 18 and 19 year olds, very little exposure to professional sales and they do role plays. She said to a person, they all default to being super salesy.
because that's how they've been conditioned. Society is conducive to everybody as they use car salesmen.
This
But Andy, at least, just getting back to the framework conversation, frameworks are so important because frameworks help us to be authentic and to use our own voice, but you're mentioning at least she's doing the role play. The reason that these frameworks don't work sometime is because people train the way they train instead of training the way people learn.
And at the end of the day, people learn through doing. They learn through repetition. They learn through practice. They actually learn through retrieval. Learning takes struggle. And a lot of managers don't let their people struggle to find the answers on their own, but they've got to take these frameworks and then not only see how they apply to sales situations, but if it's a good framework, Like, challenge your customer, I think is even better than challenge your
I agree 100%.
yeah.
And a lot of those frameworks, like, you gotta get agreement on the problem before you offer the solution. Like, that to me was the biggest aha on the planet. Like, you can apply that to your marriage. No, we're probably right?
Oh yeah.
I apply it all the time, I don't tell him what I'm doing,
well, but I,
Yeah, i'm on the other side of that curve
So, I got a group of men here, I gotta tell you.
Yeah. But I, yeah. To your point though, Sherry and Sean is, yeah, I wrote in my book, Sell Without Selling Out, that, our job as a seller is to listen to the customer to understand things that are most important to them and then help them get that. What's your job as a spouse?
Well, listen to your partner to understand things that are most important to them. Help them get that, as a colleague, how do you help support a colleague? Listen to the things that are most important to them and help them get that. As
what's the one word? What's the one word to describe all three of those examples relationship
Yeah. Relationships
help.
But it just the dynamic is relationship whether it's husband wife colleague to colleague vendor to part vendor part of the customer, right? It's all about establishing relationship and maintaining that relationship and these are the tactics by which you can maintain that relationship
The, I think the test of the rubber meeting the road is when, that is the methodology That is the way that the paradigm and the framework and then. What happens when I think that the test is what happens in the organization when the thing that person wanted or the thing that organization wanted wasn't your thing.
And how many times does that have to happen? And then how helpful are you beyond that? And then how genuine was that, that disposition of help to begin with? And right. So like, how do we stretch that from like a point in time to actually, this is actually what I want. For the person on the other side of the table, not this is something that I want to feign that I want in order to progress this relationship to the point of a sale So it's like, it's, philosophically like it makes perfect sense. At the end of the day, like, is it real is the question that I would ask in some cases.
Absolutely. All right. Unfortunately we're sort of running out of time, but that was a good answer to, to end on appreciate everybody stopping by, helping out with this today. If you could just let us know quickly, each of you, how they can get hold of you. If people are interested in learning more about you, Sherry, let's start with you.
I put out free videos every single day on linked in. So connect with me on linked in, watch our videos and or you can go to our website sherry Leviton dot com.
Perfect. Sean. As we
I'm on LinkedIn, Twitter, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, connect with me there, reference, you saw the podcast, I'd be happy to connect.
Sean Dewan, excuse me,
Yeah you can connect with me on LinkedIn, of course meritamerica. org is the name of our organization if you are at all interested or passionate in a third path for folks that allow for fast and flexible programs that work for people who work to get into tech out of low wage work, please come check out the site.
Perfect. All right. Thank you everyone.