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What if the key to scaling your company wasn’t a new strategy, but a new way of being?
In this provocative and insightful episode, executive coach and sales transformation architect Townsend Wardlaw joins us to unpack why consciousness, not just systems or hustle, is the most powerful growth lever a founder can use. From his bold take on integrity and mindset to the hidden meaning behind "yes" and "no" in sales conversations, Townsend offers a radical reframe for how leaders can drive revenue, align teams, and ultimately create companies built for a high-value exit.
🔥 What You’ll Learn:
- Why consciousness is more than mindset and how it drives tangible business outcomes
- How founders unintentionally become bottlenecks, and what to do about it
- The game-changing difference between playing to win vs. not to lose
- What it really means to lead with integrity, and how it accelerates revenue
- Why checking for understanding is a secret superpower in leadership
- A simple, powerful step to shift your company’s trajectory—starting today
About Townsend Wardlaw:
Townsend is a coach, consultant, and advisor to founders, helping companies between $1M and $10M scale revenue and create meaningful exits. He’s known for challenging leaders to elevate their consciousness and shift their results by changing how they see and show up in the world.
Connect with Townsend Wardlaw: https://www.linkedin.com/in/townsendwardlaw/
Connect with Rick Smith: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-smith-094b29b/
Check out Conquer: https://conquer.io/
Creators and Guests
What is The Future of Selling?
The Future of Selling is the go-to podcast for sales professionals looking to sharpen their skills and stay ahead in the competitive world of B2B sales. Each episode features expert interviews, real-world case studies, and actionable tips to help you navigate the complex B2B buyer's journey. Whether you're dealing with long sales cycles, multiple decision-makers, or rapidly changing technologies, we’ve got you covered. Tune in to discover the latest trends, best practices, and proven strategies for closing more deals and building lasting relationships in the B2B space. Perfect for sales leaders, account managers, and anyone aiming to master the art of B2B selling.
Future Of Selling (00:01.168)
Hey, welcome everybody to the Future of Selling podcast. We will dive into challenges, trends, innovations, anything that's impacting the future of sales or the sales landscape. My name is Rick Smith and I'm your host today and I'm so appreciative that you guys have decided to join us and listen in. Our guest today is Townsend Wardlaw. So let me tell you a little bit about Townsend. So Townsend is a sales transformation architect. He's an executive coach and a thought leader who has spent over two
decades, two decades, reshaping how companies think about selling. Townsend combines practical sales strategy with deeper work of personal development. He and I have had some contact before and we've talked about this, so a little familiar with some of that. Can't wait to get into it. And he uses that to help founders and CEOs and sales leaders align who they are with what they do. Core philosophy for Townsend.
overdoing. So he challenges the conventional sales methodologies and focuses instead on identity, mindset, which I can't wait to talk about that, and authenticity as a foundation for action and results. Townsend has worked with hundreds of companies, typically between a million and 10 million in revenue. That's kind of his sweet spot. And also you've been a frequent guest on top sales leadership leadership podcasts, which makes me really happy that you're on ours.
Townsend (01:07.139)
Yeah.
Future Of Selling (01:25.084)
And typically you want to share insights for overcoming fear, redefining what success looks like, and building sales systems that reflect core values. So I'm really looking forward to the discussion today. So Townsend, welcome. Thanks for being in the podcast. Appreciate your time today.
Townsend (01:25.379)
Yeah.
Townsend (01:44.28)
Thanks brother, great to be here.
Future Of Selling (01:45.916)
Yeah. Hey, before we get started into kind of some deeper discussion, I always like to start with just a few fun facts, if you will. So our producer went out and found a few things. And so I'm going to throw them at you. And you just gave me another one a few minutes ago. So we'll get that one in there too. So fun fact number one, before you started your corporate career, you spent a number of years working in a bike shop and rolling burritos. that accurate?
Townsend (01:55.81)
Hahaha
Townsend (02:14.846)
Yeah, I like to say I didn't have a real job until I was 27. I went to school in the East Coast and went to California to pursue fame and fortune as a professional bike racer. And yeah, I wasn't that good. That was the problem. I wasn't all that talented when you really got to that level. spent some time in the bike industry, the competitive both road and mountain bike industry, working for big manufacturers, working for bike shops. It was a blast. Took me all over the world.
Future Of Selling (02:26.329)
Nice
Okay.
Future Of Selling (02:40.656)
Yeah. Yeah.
Townsend (02:41.838)
It was a fun non-career.
Future Of Selling (02:44.868)
Right. No, that's great. That's great. So bike shops and then rolling burritos, that's fine. I think I get that one already. But like you said, your first real job is at 27 and you advance from an outbound sales position to VP of a Fortune 500 company in under six years, is pretty, I mean, pretty fast. That's pretty quick.
Townsend (02:53.25)
Yeah.
Townsend (03:07.55)
Yeah. And I went through, I think about four or five companies in those five or six years, which allowed me to do it. And back in the day, right, the idea of job hopping was, you know, it was, it was taboo. You didn't do it. And I just didn't know any better, right? I was like, well, I'm not, I'm not advancing here. I'm going to go over there. They'll pay me more. And everybody's like, you can't do that. I'm like, well, let's do it. But yeah, I went from rolling burritos and making $14,400 a year.
Future Of Selling (03:12.791)
wow.
Future Of Selling (03:19.964)
Unheard of, yeah.
Future Of Selling (03:29.456)
Yeah.
Townsend (03:34.446)
to a VP of sales at a Fortune 500, making quarter million bucks a year in about five, six years, yeah.
Future Of Selling (03:34.704)
Ha
Future Of Selling (03:38.542)
Right. Yeah, that's incredible. That's incredible. And then at one point, well, and back to your, you made this point, you had aspirations of being a professional cyclist at one point, and which leads me to the one you gave me, which is, do you really have the largest collection of Adidas kind of workout track suits?
Townsend (04:00.088)
Track suits and short kits, right? It's summer now. So yeah, I grew up in the eighties in the era of, know, Run DMC and Maya Adidas and track suits. And we were broke, didn't have any money. And I was also into break dancing. was literally going to break dancing competitions when I was like 16, 17 years old. And all the cool break dancers had an Adidas track suit. did. And I had some, you know, off-brand. A few years ago, I was in Vegas with a buddy of mine and I got the idea.
Future Of Selling (04:04.762)
Yeah.
Future Of Selling (04:12.252)
Yeah.
Future Of Selling (04:25.659)
Right.
Townsend (04:30.028)
I said, let's go to the Adidas store and buy some tracksuits. And we bought some tracksuits, wore them out to the clubs, gambling, everything. I literally woke up in it the next morning. That's how fun it was. And I woke up thinking, I want to do this the rest of my life. I just want to wear tracksuits. So I started acquiring. And about three years later, just started. That's what I wear. Like I got closets full. I have a storage unit in Denver with bins of tracksuits, all different, all Adidas. Some you've never hit the stores. They're semi-custom.
Future Of Selling (04:43.962)
Right.
Future Of Selling (04:54.022)
Yeah. Yeah.
Townsend (04:58.478)
I got a thing for it, I don't know what to say.
Future Of Selling (05:00.358)
Yeah, no, it's great. And I'm not a tracksuit guy yet. I may be after today's after today's conversation with you. mean, like I had to, put on a jacket and a tie about a month and a half ago and it so awkward to me, you know, because I had a big meeting and I knew for that I needed to do it. And, but you know, it's all, it's all, you know, college shirts or t-shirts. I don't know why we did that.
Townsend (05:12.917)
What?
Townsend (05:22.422)
It's so strange, isn't it? I wore a tie last month for the first time in a decade. I got myself ordained and officiated my wife's mom's wedding to her new husband. So she wanted me to wear a tie and I'm like, how do you do this thing? And it was hilarious, but I did it for her.
Future Of Selling (05:38.236)
Yeah, that's good. Yeah, I know it just feels awkward now, but yeah, thankfully we live in a little bit more casual world, you know, so that's all good. Cool, well, good deal. Well, those are our fun facts. Just to give everybody a little bit, you know, we'll have some, talk about some things today, but I always like to give people the opportunity to know you maybe just a little bit from a different point of view, if you will. So let's talk about...
Townsend (05:47.256)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
Townsend (06:00.962)
Yeah, I love that.
Future Of Selling (06:04.58)
Kind of what you do though, right? So defining consciousness in business, you describe consciousness as the ultimate business tool. talk about that, define that for us and tell us, kind of explain that. Why is it the ultimate business tool?
Townsend (06:16.558)
Yeah. Yep.
Townsend (06:21.632)
Yep, I love the question. Little context. In 2002, I left my high paying corporate salary and launched a company, a sales consulting company. The dot com bust was occurring. So all my clients that were going to pay for sales training and process work ditched me. I pivoted the company to outsource selling high end bespoke outsourced selling for software companies looking to
enter markets, launch products, et cetera. Through the course of six or seven years, I literally was one of the few who were creating this thing called, now we call them SDRs and BDRs, they didn't exist. But in 2007, I had an outbound SDR shop doing contract outsourcing of high-end appointment setting for software companies. We were doing a million outbound phone calls a year when you would hand dial them, there were no dialers.
and built this industry. That company went down in about 2009. And that's a whole other story. It was a great experience, but I ran out of money, sanity, health, et cetera. I got into just solo consulting at that point. said, I'm done running companies, but I hung up my shingle as a consultant to help founders grow their companies. So from about 2009 to 2018, I worked with about
300 different founders helped three dozen of them go from growth to exit, put more than a billion dollars in the founders and their investors' bank accounts by applying what I call the craft of consulting. Implementation of process, tools, people, training, systems, reporting, the hard stuff, the stuff that we're used to doing to generate results. I had a pretty good stint as a...
Future Of Selling (08:13.478)
Bye.
Townsend (08:16.618)
as a LinkedIn sales influencer, before we called them that, had a mailing list of 27,000 people. And that's what I was doing. I was, I was teaching the world how to sell and teaching founders how to build sales systems and train people and all that stuff. And I had a lot of success. In 2019, I started working with a series of coaches and have worked with literally some of the top coaches in the world. And I'll skip the story for today. But
Future Of Selling (08:30.716)
Yeah.
Townsend (08:46.4)
I made a decision, I'm done consulting, I want to do this thing called coaching. Now for me, the distinction is very simple. Consulting is where I come in as the expert. I got the playbook, the process, the tools. I'm going to teach you, I'm going to run it, I'm going to lead it, right? Listen to me and you'll get what you want. Coaching is a very different discipline. And coaching is where we start with the assumption that the expert is across the, the chair or the table or the, or the Zoom from me. And it is my job as a coach to help who I am serving see themselves in the world differently. And
Future Of Selling (08:50.544)
Okay.
Townsend (09:16.462)
you know, the way I coach and I coach at what I call the level of consciousness, some call it Transformational Coaching. We coach at this idea that you work from the inside out, not the outside in. So up until 2019, I generated tons of revenue for folks and, and, and we'll call it Generation Changing Wealth for people, doing, focusing on all the doing. And what I've discovered since then is there's a whole nother
whole nother set of tools here that relate to what I call the being, or sometimes I call consciousness. And when I speak about consciousness, it's fairly simple. Consciousness is everything. Everything that exists, the entire universe, everything in it is consciousness. And I have a level of consciousness. In this experience of planet Earth, in this experience as a human, I have an awareness, a consciousness of life. And
Within the human experience, there are levels of consciousness. And just one way to think about this really simply is there are people who go through life and there's a lot of struggle. There's a lot of strife. Like life is really hard and sometimes it's for economic reasons or where they are in the world. There's political reasons. And sometimes it's something else. And that's what I call this thing called consciousness. And the best analogy I've ever come across, it's not mine, but I love using it is,
you can think about consciousness as an infinite glass elevator. So here we are in this experience of life. And imagine there's this infinite glass elevator and everybody's got a little key card. And you go in the elevator, you put your key card in and your elevator goes to a certain floor. And whatever floor you're on, you have a seeing and awareness of the world, right? Down on the ground floor, it's really busy and noisy and frustrating. There's all these things to bump into. You get to the mezzine, a little quieter. Well, the higher you go up, the view is...
completely different. You see and experience the world differently. What floors below looked like a brick wall is actually not a brick wall at all. You just go around it over this way and you can see things differently. So when we work at the level of consciousness, what we seek to do is change the experience of the individual in the world based on what they see and then the thoughts they have about the world and then the actions they take. And I'll pause there and I can give examples of how this applies in sales, but really,
Townsend (11:38.606)
The thing that has shifted most for me in the last, well, whatever it is, you know, six, seven, eight years, is I have found that the results that can be produced are extraordinarily better working at this level. The speed is faster and the degree to which change sticks is incomparable, right? And anybody in any selling organization where they've had a trainer come in and a process and the guy, we're going to do this. And then six months later, we're back to where we were again.
Future Of Selling (12:08.636)
Yeah. Yeah.
Townsend (12:09.154)
we'll get this idea that something about just teaching people different ways of doing things has its limitations versus saying, hey, what's going on with the person who's showing up to do the doing and learning the new stuff? What do they see differently?
Future Of Selling (12:23.462)
Yeah. And is that because, so we've got a couple of questions for you there. do you think that's because when I'm just about adding tasks, adding skills, adding doing, it's like putting a tool belt on someone, but it's not really who they are versus consciousness, right? When I hear your description about, I can only go so far, you know, that my consciousness
Townsend (12:42.136)
Yeah.
Future Of Selling (12:50.894)
only allows me to go so far up in the elevator, right? And then open the doors and here's what I see. It feels to me like the basis of that is mindset, right? And maybe we'd see it differently, so tell me. But to me, my mindset dictates what I'm able to see.
Townsend (12:58.072)
Yeah.
Townsend (13:04.813)
Yeah.
Well, what I like to say is, Yep.
Townsend (13:15.15)
The answer is yes and, right? And I love when people talk about mindset, because at least it's a level up from skill set, right? Because there's so much focus on skill set. So I love the idea of mindset. What I like to say is mindset is actually produced from consciousness. Like literally the thoughts in our head are produced from the idea of how the world occurs for us. And some of that is our experience of life, where we're born, how we're raised.
Future Of Selling (13:17.007)
Okay.
Townsend (13:43.502)
how we've created success in the past. I'll give you a simple example. I was hired a couple of years ago by a VC group to work with one of their software companies. I met with the founder, pretty simple problem. The founder started hiring salespeople and they can't get the selling done. Founder's been doing all the selling, now it's okay, the salespeople gotta do it, but they're not doing it. So I said, sure, I'll take care of it for you. Now they knew me from my training and consulting and systems and process days. So I met with the founder, turns out the two sales,
folks, the two sales gentlemen, are over in Bangalore, India. Speak perfect English, one had a master's degree, one had a regular degree, and very smart, very capable people. They weren't selling anything. They even advancing the deals. Two months later, the CEO calls me, he goes, what did you do to my people? Like, this is amazing. I said, well, we had some conversation. He goes, no, what'd you teach them? What'd you train them? I want to know. I said, I didn't teach them anything. I never talked about a process. I never talked about a technique.
Future Of Selling (14:21.969)
Right.
Future Of Selling (14:31.665)
Right.
Townsend (14:44.032)
they went out and found techniques. They went out and actually found videos, I had put it from years ago and started implementing those. He goes, what did you do for two months? I said, well, we talked. He goes, what do mean you talked? I well, we talked about life. We talked about how does life look for you when you show up on a sales call, when you're talking to somebody like you're somebody in India, how does life literally occur? What do you see? And we talked about the dimensions of authority and.
Future Of Selling (14:50.523)
Yeah.
Townsend (15:11.456)
respect and politeness and, and ethics and honesty and all these dimensions just that we take for granted, right? Because what I know is I've been teaching people how to do the, I call it the Townsend dance for selling. You know, I did that for, you know, a couple decades, but they're not me. They don't see the world through my eyes, through my experiences. So you can teach somebody the moves, but if they don't see the world in such a way that those moves make sense, they won't use them.
Whereas if you work with them on how do you see yourself in the world? How do you see the world, right? It's not a huge mental leap to say that somebody from Bangalore, India is going to have a very different view of authority and what's okay that you can do if somebody's perceived to be up here, right? They have a caste system. So what I invited them to do was to not just see the world, but see where they were seeing the world from.
Future Of Selling (15:57.67)
Right. Yeah.
Townsend (16:09.576)
and know that that's not the only place you can see it. And then invite them to have a different way of looking at it, like, I don't know, like maybe I would look at it. It didn't change who they were in their world, but then when they were stepping into their sales role, they could say, I'm not that guy. I'm a different person, right, with a different set of worldview, et cetera. They literally went several layers up on the consciousness elevator and saw the world differently, started having different thoughts about what was even possible.
Future Of Selling (16:12.667)
Right.
Townsend (16:38.51)
and then of course took the logical actions, I didn't have to tell them what to do.
Future Of Selling (16:42.054)
Yeah, yeah. know, many years ago, I used to work with at-risk kids and families, right? And one of the things we always worked with the kids was, we called it back then, we called it schema. I don't know if we'd still call it that today, but it was how you see the world and how you believe the world sees you. It made all the difference in the world, right? And so it... Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Townsend (16:56.59)
I love that, yeah.
That's right.
Townsend (17:06.222)
That's con, we're talking consciousness, baby. That's consciousness. That is, right? Because if I see the world differently, right, I start to literally have different, like you and I walk in a room, know, demographically we're pretty similar, right? Both, you know, white men of a certain age, professional sales, but we'll still have different thoughts about the room, what's going on, the people, you know, what they're thinking, what they're not, you know, all we do is go around projecting our idea of the world and everybody else.
What we don't realize is they're projecting their idea of the world on us. So once you can start to see that, you can work with it in a different way. What I say is whenever there's conflict, whenever there's a challenge, this could be in a deal, the deal's stuck, somebody's not giving the information, whatever. Well, what we try to do is reinforce our position over here and provide more information, data, and take a stand for our case. Well, what we don't realize is they're not even looking at the same scenario in the middle. So whatever their...
Future Of Selling (17:38.564)
Right. Right.
Townsend (18:03.306)
objections are just, they're going to produce more of that. What we need to do is figure out how to both be looking at it from the same place, from the same angle, and then we'll both see the same view of reality. And I got a little quick story on that. I got a client a couple years ago called me up, we'd been coaching together for about a year and a half. He is a regional head of a multi-billion dollar, we'll call it a private equity backed, one of these roll up things. They roll up, you know, specialty,
practices that have to do with teeth stuff. That's all I can say. Anyway, he called me up one day and goes, I have a problem. We got to talk through a problem. I got an issue. So right away, consciousness, he sees something. He sees a problem. So in the moment he called it a problem from where he's looking, that immediately limited all his options to what do you do with the problem? Last time I checked, you don't go and hug a problem. You don't love a problem. You remove it. So even in the language people use, they reveal their consciousness. And this will be
Future Of Selling (18:54.554)
Right.
Townsend (18:59.022)
be something we can talk about sort of at the end of what people can do, because it literally is about starting to have a perception of your language and your thinking and see how you're projecting the Anyway, we got a problem. So we started talking and he's describing the problem. Now as he's talking it to me and telling me what he sees, my eyes get a little bigger because what I see from where I'm standing is that's actually a million dollars in additional cash and equity for you, Right? Like from where I'm looking, I'm like, that's a pile of money.
Future Of Selling (19:24.113)
Right.
Townsend (19:27.758)
Now, if I had simply said, you're wrong, it ain't that, it's this, he would argued with me, oh, it won't work, what have you. So sort of metaphorically, he's over here, I'm over here, the thing's in the middle. From here, he sees a problem, from here, I see a million bucks. Well, we've been working together, so we do the stuff that I do and we use the tools that I've taught him. And it's like, again, metaphorically, he moves over here and all of a sudden he's coming around to my, and as soon he gets over here, he goes, oh, that's a million dollars.
He literally had the same thought that I did about it. I didn't have to tell him what it was. And here's the beautiful part. Once instead of seeing a problem, you see a million dollars, well, I don't need to tell you what to do about the million dollars. You go get it. And you know how to go get it. So, so we're done. So that's where I talk about this, this, this coaching at the level of consciousness is fast. Right?
Future Of Selling (19:59.973)
Right. Right.
Future Of Selling (20:17.146)
Right. Yeah, because you kind of, what it sounds like you helped him do was remove the pair of glasses he was looking through, move to your side of the table, metaphorically, and put on the pair of glasses that you were looking at.
Townsend (20:25.719)
Yes.
Yeah.
I use that example all the time. I'm like, just pretend, hey, put on your what would towns and see glasses, right? That's an idea. that's one way to move our consciousness, Ultimately, working on our consciousness is less about changing it than realizing, it's working, right? And I love to use the example of like a movie theater as a metaphor.
Future Of Selling (20:34.289)
Okay.
Future Of Selling (20:37.975)
okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Townsend (20:59.982)
So you're sitting in a movie theater and you're watching the movie and you're like, I don't like this film, this thing sucks. So you're having all these thoughts about this movie sucks and then maybe you're like, yeah, I'll throw some stuff at the movie. Or maybe I'll go over there and I'll cut down that thing that, I'll cut the movie out. Well, you ain't cutting the movie out, because that's not the movie, that's a screen. The movie's up there in the booth. We are all walking around on this planet yelling at, interacting with, trying to change what's on the screen by doing something with the screen.
We don't realize that has very limited utility, all the actions up in the projector booth. And guess where the projector booth is? It's here, right? It is where we are in that elevator. Yeah.
Future Of Selling (21:37.307)
Right.
Yeah, yeah. I know for me personally, I work on, and so maybe I'm thinking about it incorrectly, but like I work on mindset a lot because I feel like, and to me, I think about it two different ways. I think I've got an intentional mindset and I think I've got a default mindset. And that's that one you're talking about, right? The one that, and for whatever you picked it up from a teacher, a parent,
Townsend (21:57.688)
Yep. Yeah. Yep. Yep.
Townsend (22:05.582)
Yep.
Future Of Selling (22:05.954)
circumstance, whatever it is, you've got this now this default mindset. It's like a backpack full of rocks that you're carrying around with you. And so the goal for me anyway is I'm always thinking, okay, that's my default. I know that's how I would typically think about it and see it. But here's what my intentional mindset says about this situation. Right? So I don't know if that's the right way to think about it, but that's kind of how I approach it.
Townsend (22:13.826)
Yep.
Townsend (22:26.338)
Yes. Yep. I love that.
It's perfect. Here's a nuance that I'll share and maybe a little more than people are ready for listening, maybe not, but I'd love to share it with you. When I think of mindset, I think of the work I do on my thinking with my thoughts. This thing up here produces 30,000 to 50,000 thoughts a day. So I have a thought, oh, this won't work out. Or I have a thought, oh, this is gonna be hard. Now, mindset work says, let's shift that thought. We can do better than that.
Future Of Selling (22:46.416)
Okay. Yeah.
Townsend (23:03.148)
So mindset work is about reframing, adjusting, changing, moving, and it's powerful work. Don't get me wrong. The shortcoming of mindset work is you gotta keep doing it. When I talk about consciousness, when I talk about that which even produces the thinking itself. So I have the thought this is gonna be hard, I can turn this is gonna be hard to this will be easy. Wonderful. The bigger question is, what would I need to shift
Future Of Selling (23:07.772)
job.
Future Of Selling (23:15.984)
Okay.
Future Of Selling (23:22.246)
Yeah.
Townsend (23:33.004)
such that the next time I was in a similar situation, I never produced the thought, this will be hard. And my native thought was, this will be easy. So that to me is the distinction between mindset and consciousness.
Future Of Selling (23:41.179)
Yeah.
Future Of Selling (23:44.637)
Okay. I think I like that. I definitely like that. How do you, how does, so I'm going to try to quit going so deep into this, but it just, the topic interests me a great deal. so two questions. One is how does one kind of what's the process to change consciousness? And then just to get us back into the kind of sales track. Most leaders probably, mean, most, most
Townsend (23:49.154)
Yeah, yeah.
Townsend (23:57.517)
Yeah.
Future Of Selling (24:14.648)
leaders are thinking about scale and they're thinking about revenue, valuation. How do you get them to take consciousness seriously and go, okay, you know what, and get away from the metrics, the measurements, the skills, you know, all that stuff and go, no, consciousness is really where we need to focus inside versus outside. So this is...
Townsend (24:28.941)
Yep. Yep.
Yeah. Yep. So that's a great question. First thing I'll say is using consciousness as a tool to work on the business stuff does not mean letting go of any of the metrics or measures or results. People say, I don't want all that fluff. I'm like, this ain't fluffy because we're still going to use the data. I'm still going to track how many calls does somebody make? What were the completions? Like all that works. You don't change that.
In fact, if you're building a business, you have to, you don't just kind of go, hey, we'll see how it goes, right? We have to deliver, we have to perform. So that's the first thing from a running the business, nothing changes. What this comes down to is in its simplest terms, learning to see an opportunity to work on the inside instead of the outside, right? So what generations of sales professionals and leaders have been trained on and taught is when something's not working,
get people to do different things. Train them, coach them, role-play them, blah, blah, blah, all sorts of stuff. Makes sense. In order to work the level of consciousness, you actually have to pause that. Because if I'm telling somebody what to do, I can't help them see who they're being that's doing that, and then I can't work with it. So now, how do you, how do you instill this in organizations? That's a great question. Currently, I work with five clients.
I have very long-term relationships. These are, these are very intimate relationships. For my clients, I coach the founder. I coach the entire leadership team. I insert myself everywhere in the company. And I've been doing this for several years. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm tied to the outcome of the company. So I'm getting paid, but like we're playing for the exit. So a lot of alignment. And I've been fine doing that for the last, I don't know, five, six, seven years. Recently, I've decided, chosen that I really want to do more of this and bring it into the world.
Townsend (26:29.814)
so people can really experience it at scale. Now there's two things that are required for that. One is more of people that know how to do this work, and this is very specialized work. The other is people who understand the value of it, and there's not many of them. So my process is not intended to transform the whole world. I am on a mission to build a hundred million dollar coaching company that does this. And you can't sell consciousness the way you sell training or consulting or traditional things because
Future Of Selling (26:43.131)
Right.
Townsend (26:58.69)
Fundamentally, the only way to understand the power of consciousness and working at that level is to experience it. So it ain't something I'm gonna run landing pages and Facebook ads and that stuff, but from a very strategic level, and I've spent 20, 30 years building relationships with founders and people who run a company, I reach out to those folks and I say, I wanna share something with you. I wanna have a conversation with you. I wanna do something with your team.
So what we do is we come in and we create an experience of shifting consciousness and they don't even know it's that. It's just like, we're do a little workshop on something. And when people experience that, it's very different. go, well, that was different. don't think he told me anything that I need to do differently, but things seem to be different. How do we do more of that? And in every single case of any company that I've ever worked with,
Future Of Selling (27:37.776)
Right.
Townsend (27:55.95)
working at the level of consciousness begins with the person on top, right? If the founder or the CEO or whoever's running the show doesn't understand the power of this, well then they're always gonna reflexively revert back to, yeah, we need you some training, we need you to do this and let's manage them tighter. And those things work too, right? It's not like they don't work, they're just not as effective. So that's sort of a high level answer to that question.
Future Of Selling (28:20.22)
Yeah, okay. Yeah, so I do a currently in the midst of facilitating a mastermind group on growth, right? And one of the things that we talk about a lot and kind of came up is this idea of being bigger on the inside than the outside, right? That if that, know, and I think about my 20 year picture and we challenged everybody, hey, put your year picture together. What does that look like? You know, what are you trying to get to?
Townsend (28:27.96)
Yeah.
Townsend (28:45.677)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Future Of Selling (28:48.796)
but also realize that your 20 year picture, you're probably going to have some things in it that are more outwardly focused. You know, I want this, I want to get that. And you're probably going to have some things more inwardly focused as well. And if you'll focus on being bigger on the inside, in other words, the effort goes toward the things that are inwardly focused, the outwardly focused will very likely take care of themselves. You agree with that?
Townsend (28:58.382)
Yep.
Townsend (29:02.946)
Yeah.
Townsend (29:13.091)
Yeah.
Isn't that amazing, huh? Isn't that amazing? It 100%, 100%. Right? What I say is you can create an idea of a goal or a vision or something you want, and then build a plan of the stuff you need to do to get there. What I like to ask is a different question. It sounds a lot like the question you're asking, which is when I'm there, who will I be? Who will I have become that is there, that got there? And
Future Of Selling (29:27.035)
Yeah.
Townsend (29:44.874)
If I was going to get bigger on the inside now, what could I do to put myself there, not with the outside stuff, but with the inside stuff? And then I'll naturally do the things that will get me there. Right? So, Benjamin Hardy writes a lot about this stuff. I love his work, right? Who, who, not how, and be your future self now, I think is another one he does. And it's just this idea of you can create the idea, not just of what you want, but what that experience will be like.
Future Of Selling (29:55.217)
Right.
Future Of Selling (30:00.251)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Future Of Selling (30:14.054)
Yeah.
Townsend (30:14.472)
and who you will be when you have it. Like, how will you see the world? What will you think? And then bring those ideas into the present and create that future consciousness now. Your consciousness will, the way I talk about it, grow. And that higher consciousness will see the world differently, have different thoughts about it, take different actions. And those actions will move you effortlessly towards the outcome that you started by creating the whole thing with.
Future Of Selling (30:41.563)
Right, right, yeah. Yeah, it's been a ton of fun. We've got about nine guys that are in it. And first time I've ever done it. But anyway, it's been exceptional. It's been exceptional. So we're gonna do it again. We're gonna keep doing it. So anyway, it's good stuff. So when you think about consciousness and doing a little bit of research,
Townsend (30:43.296)
I love that you're doing that with the group, man, that's fantastic.
Townsend (30:56.86)
that's cool.
Townsend (31:01.388)
Nice.
Future Of Selling (31:10.588)
You talk about creating alignment through vision. Is that part of the magic behind creating consciousness or not? How does that play into it?
Townsend (31:22.306)
Well, when you say vision, you mean like vision for the company or for the person or how do mean that?
Future Of Selling (31:26.416)
Yeah, so I think that I would assume it's going to be vision for the person first and vision for the company second, because to your point, you're going to start with the leader, right? And here's my belief. Everything rises and falls on leadership, everything. So if you're not working with the leader first and get that person there from a vision standpoint, then everybody else, they're not going to do it. So how does that
Townsend (31:43.444)
Everything. Yep.
Townsend (31:55.768)
Yeah, I love this. So, so many thoughts right now. The first is, in my consulting days, I did a lot of, you what we would call assessments. I'll come in, look at your process, people, tools, all this stuff, and say like, here's what you need to do, you know, that's not working and stuff. Well these days, if I'm asked to come into a company and look around and kind of assess the sales org or how they're doing.
Future Of Selling (31:56.454)
How does that play?
Townsend (32:22.092)
I still talk to all the people and I do the same stuff, but when I do my readout, if you will, I have a very different conversation. And the conversation I have with the leader is, let me tell you about the guy who runs the company that this sales team works for. What I can tell you is this team is a projection of the leadership of this company. They created it, they didn't wander in here by accident, it's not a mistake.
So let's not look at what the sales team, as an example, let's not look at what the sales team is doing as right or wrong or good or bad. Let's say they're doing what they're doing, because that is an expression of the consciousness of the leadership. when I say, let me tell you about the leader, it's like this leader values this, they don't value that, this is how they see the world. And they're like, their eyes are getting wide when I'm telling them this. And they're like, yeah, that's me. I said, wonderful. Now, you asked me to come look at what's
Future Of Selling (33:15.888)
Right.
Townsend (33:20.582)
Well, I'll you, nothing's broken. It's working perfectly from how you're creating it. So let's look at what's going on and everything that's going on about this guy and what he values has an upside and a downside. So what's a great example is often I'll find a very technical founder and I'll say, hey, whoever built this team really values knowing the technology and understanding. I said, so tell me why that's good and they'll have a good answer for it.
Future Of Selling (33:24.774)
Yeah.
Townsend (33:48.908)
I say, wonderful, now tell me the potential downside. And they'll be like, well, they might emphasize that and not know sales. I said, beautiful, how would you mitigate that risk? And they say, well, I do this, this, and this. I'm like, wonderful, then let's do that. Right, you see, but if you get them seeing, they know what to do. They don't need me to tell them, nobody has a sales process here. Everybody's winging it. They don't need me to tell them that. So that's an example of that. When it comes to the vision, I love the way you said that, individuals must be
Future Of Selling (34:08.209)
Right.
Right.
Townsend (34:18.712)
playing a game, or they're just showing up, right? And people want to play a game called Retire, Get Rich, Travel the World, whatever. They all want something. They don't tend to spend enough time really thinking, What is it that I want? What do I want to create, right? The number of folks that I've coached when I first started working with them, when I said, What are you playing for? What do you dream about? Like, you know, what's your vision? Well, I want to have financial security.
travel more, spend more time with the family and give back. I'm like, dude, that's a bumper sticker. That's not a vision. So, so let's work on that first, because that's not particularly compelling. That's just like a concept or a postcard. So really creating like, where do you want to be? My life is an example. My wife and I spend six months of the year in a home base. It's currently Arizona. The other six months of the year, we travel, go all over the world, different places, be in Denver this summer, be in Portugal and India in October.
Future Of Selling (34:53.456)
Hahaha
Future Of Selling (34:59.835)
Yeah.
Future Of Selling (35:10.769)
Yeah.
Future Of Selling (35:16.72)
Love it.
Townsend (35:18.526)
I do this all day long. My day, literally the day on my calendar was something I wrote down as part of my vision. Like 10 years ago, I want to wake up, I want to do this, I want to this, have my coffee, go for a run, have three conversations, be on a podcast. Like it was that level of clarity and granularity. So we move towards whatever vision we put up here and we create. So the first thing is creating that vision. And then, and then how does the vision for the company align?
Future Of Selling (35:41.786)
Yeah.
Townsend (35:45.23)
with them? And do they see the connectivity there? You got a clear vision for the company. You got a company full of people with a clear vision of where they want to get to when they're aligned. It's like you don't have 10 people working for you. You have 100 people working. You don't need more people. So.
Future Of Selling (35:59.398)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Because that's that's the thing, right? When we did this in our group, this 20 year picture idea, the vision, right, of where we wanted to go. It was it was amazing how and even for me, right. I had never written it down and I wrote it and I wrote it down in five minutes. I mean, it took no time to actually put detail to it. But the power of putting detail to it was amazing.
Townsend (36:09.325)
Yeah.
Townsend (36:16.942)
Yeah.
Future Of Selling (36:27.324)
And then we were in our group, we're talking about it and almost to a person, they didn't have one. It's like, I don't know. So we get in this tendency of just treading water, doing what we do and hoping it all works out as opposed to using your consciousness to say, is who I want to be. This is where I want to be. In 20 years, this is the experience I want to have.
Townsend (36:35.032)
Yeah, they don't.
Townsend (36:47.832)
Yeah.
Townsend (36:52.086)
Yeah, a couple of years ago, a gentleman got ahold of me on LinkedIn. We had a conversation. He wasn't gonna be a client or anything. Just, you he's a sales guy. And in our course of talking, I said, what are you playing for? What's your big dream? And he said, I want a house. I want to buy my family a house. I said, cool, tell me about it. He goes, what? want to buy my house. No, I said, tell me about the house. He goes, no, I don't have it yet. I said, no, but tell me about the one you'd like to have. First of all, where is it? He goes, probably Maine.
I said, okay, what else can you tell me? He started going, I want to be 100 yards from the water, four bedrooms, three baths, like it blew. He described it to a T. I said, awesome, thanks, man. It was great chatting with you and hung up. Two years later, I got on the phone with him. We were just chatting, catching up. I said, hey, how's that house? He goes, oh, he hadn't even told me. He says, oh, it's amazing. We closed on it two months ago. I said, you're up in Maine, right? He goes, yeah. I said, it's that blue and 100 yards from the water. He's like,
Wait, how do you know this? I'm like, well, you know, four bedrooms, three baths. He goes, how do you know all these things? I said, cause you told me two years ago, you created this. had, he had forgotten. He had forgot. I didn't forget. He had forgotten that he told me. That's how powerful, that's how powerful this stuff is. Yeah. Yeah.
Future Of Selling (37:56.294)
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, no, I agree. How do you, so talk about this a little bit. What about integrity and authenticity as it lends itself to consciousness and also as it lends itself to results in company or in a sales role? Why are those so important?
Townsend (38:18.254)
Yep.
Townsend (38:29.186)
Yep. Yeah. Beautiful question. So for me, when you think of like first principles of building a company, building a career, building a life, No. 1 is Integrity. No. 2 is what I call Agreements. When I talk about Integrity, I don't mean doing the right thing. I don't talk about something moral or, or a cultural value. When I talk about Integrity,
Literally the word means wholeness, the degree to which something is whole. Now if you think about this in a real simplistic way, the only tool that we have to create with is our word. Right? We speak, I'm gonna do this. We say we're gonna do this, we talk to other people and we create agreements about what we're gonna do with our word. Whether that's I'm gonna build a 100 dollar company, I'm gonna lose 10 pounds, I'm gonna be faithful, whatever it is, it's our word.
Well, if you think of the word, not just as this air that comes out of the mouth, but the fundamental building block of all that we create, cement, concrete is the fundamental building material for an apartment building, it makes sense to ask, how powerful is my word? How strong is my word? If I build a big apartment complex on the beach in Miami, and it's got all the beautiful places with the beautiful, you know,
decorator designed homes and the throw blankets and the infinity pools and the concierge and all this stuff. But somewhere along the way, whoever was pouring the concrete said, you know, let me see if I can make a couple extra bucks here. I'm gonna mix in some sawdust. Well, the thing that it's built on, the fundamental material is not whole. It's not gonna do what it's supposed to do. So when the hurricane comes, it's gonna fail catastrophically. Well,
I talk to founders all the time, I we're gonna go to 10 million, we're gonna sell to this. They got all these big visions. So that's the building they wanna create. And I go, well, that's interesting, because you showed up 10 minutes late to this conversation with a bunch of excuses. When I was talking to your team, all they have are reasons why things aren't getting done. Nobody's owned everything. Like the integrity of the word here is really weak.
Townsend (40:46.84)
People don't do what they say they're gonna do and that's not just delivering on deadlines, that's literally showing up to meetings and everybody's got, right? So how are gonna build that with that word? So one of the things that we work on first with these companies is the integrity of the word of every human that works there. Then we work on the integrity and creating agreements with our customers, right? How do you grow a business when nobody in your company says,
I'm going to do this and it gets done, but we've got excuses and reasons. Nobody says, Hey, I told you it's going get done, but it's going to be 5 days late. You got to chase them and find out. And then that's our relationship with all our people and all our customers do that. Well, that means we got to work really hard, 10 times harder, just to get the same amount of stuff done. Imagine an organization where people, I call it, honor their word. And that means giving their word.
Future Of Selling (41:31.504)
Right.
Townsend (41:39.49)
doing what they say they're gonna do when they say they're gonna do it, or cleaning up the mess when you're not your word. Hey, I'm running five minutes late, my apologies, I'll make it up to you. Not waltzing in 10 minutes later going, hey, sorry, traffic was bad, nothing I could do. So imagine a world like that where you interacted with your customers and let them know, listen, when we say we're gonna do something, we're gonna do it, you can count on us, and I need you to do the same. Right, because we live in a world and a society that has learned to trade.
Future Of Selling (41:52.571)
Right.
Townsend (42:07.402)
everything for integrity. We trade how we look, looking good, not hurting people's feelings, not giving bad news. So we're all trying to create lives and companies with a very weak word, as I like to say.
Future Of Selling (42:21.008)
Yeah, that almost that reminds me a little bit of the trust equation, right? You probably are familiar with it, but one of the key ingredients of the trust equation is reliability, which is probably maybe that's a little bit different than what you're talking about, but it's really difficult for a client to trust you or anybody else for that matter if you're not credible.
Townsend (42:34.562)
Yeah. Yeah. Yep.
Townsend (42:44.494)
Yeah. Yep.
Future Of Selling (42:46.17)
And if you're not reliable, and there's other components to it, the reliability piece has to be there.
Townsend (42:51.36)
It does. I was talking to a gentleman this week, yeah, was earlier this week, who were talking about working together. No money has changed hands yet. And you know, we do the conversation and the discovery and all this stuff. said, listen, before we can even talk about money, we need have a conversation about integrity and agreements and how I'm gonna behave and how you're gonna behave and what's gonna be required for us to even progress. No money yet.
Future Of Selling (43:17.382)
Yeah. Yeah.
Townsend (43:18.614)
We spent 45 minutes, and by the way, I gave him homework and he had to read this and that. We spent 45 minutes creating the agreements that would govern everything we do together. Starting with, we both agree to tell the truth and speak the truth even if the other person might get mad. We will be our word. We're gonna do what we say we're gonna do or we're gonna let somebody know we're not gonna do it. And you know, I have two pages of agreements that I create with people so we can work together. Now,
Future Of Selling (43:35.377)
Right.
Townsend (43:46.414)
with those agreements with a high level of integrity, we create miracles, right? I get done in an hour with somebody, what would take them six months, but only from the integrity, the agreements, the commitment to serve in them and their commitment to this change. Otherwise, a lot of hot air, a lot of words, a lot of, I didn't get to that. I'll do better, yeah. I love when people say, I need you to hold me accountable. I say, that's not what I do.
Future Of Selling (43:55.942)
Right.
Future Of Selling (44:08.217)
Yeah, yeah,
Townsend (44:14.638)
I help people hold themselves accountable and learn the power of that in their lives, not just at work, but in their marriages with their kids, in their church, in their society, right? Yeah.
Future Of Selling (44:23.642)
Yeah, yeah. Does authenticity, is that any different for you than integrity? And does that play into the conscious? If it is different, does that play into the consciousness piece for you?
Townsend (44:34.83)
Yet to me, and I love the word authenticity, and people will say, oh, you're so authentic. I say, well, thank you, that's a byproduct of integrity. You can't be inauthentic if you're in integrity, because I'm never trying to be something other than who I am. The phrase I like to use is, my video and my audio always match. You know in the old movies when they're out of sync? I said, I'm always trying to my audio and video match, so yeah.
Future Of Selling (44:43.548)
Okay, yeah.
Future Of Selling (44:57.818)
Right. Yep.
Future Of Selling (45:03.686)
Yeah.
Townsend (45:04.77)
You can call that authenticity. I call that showing up and being in integrity. Yeah, yeah.
Future Of Selling (45:08.144)
Yeah, okay, got it, got it. What about playing to win versus playing to not lose? Talk about that concept a little bit and how that plays into what you're doing, the work you're doing.
Townsend (45:15.15)
yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that. Well, think about, I don't know, Denver Broncos will use that. We won't use the Rockies because I don't know what they're playing for, I'm not sure if it's easier. But, and I know about this, not firsthand, but secondhand from somebody that's worked with them. When they start,
at their, you know, their training season. When training camp starts, first day of training, they're not showing up to train and play and kind of see how it goes. They create, we're winning the Super Bowl. Every action, every activity, every training camp, every practice, every meal, every game is within the context of because we're winning the Super Bowl. That's playing to win. Now,
Future Of Selling (46:08.038)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Townsend (46:11.438)
There's playing not to lose, which is a really extreme mindset. And I think a lot of people do that. I show up every day so bad things don't happen, right? I want to do this so I don't run out of money, so I don't go broke, so I don't look bad, so I don't screw it up, right? All those are powerful motivators, but those fall in the category of playing not to lose versus playing to win. And then in the middle, there's something which I don't think even belongs to them. I think it's almost worse than playing
Future Of Selling (46:32.006)
Yeah. Yeah.
Townsend (46:41.142)
not to lose. And I call that, I'll do my best. Like, I get it. It's nice to say I'll do my best. I ain't living this life to do my best. I'm living this life to win. And of course, when I'm playing to win, I do my best. But, but you never hear me say, Well, let's do our best. No, let's win. And playing to win means we might lose. That won't be bad or shameful. But we can at least say, Well, we were playing to win, and we didn't. What can we learn from that?
Future Of Selling (46:47.354)
Lukewarm.
Future Of Selling (47:00.774)
Right.
Townsend (47:11.03)
When it's, well, we did our best, there's no learning, right? There's like, well, of course you did your best. What's the fun in that? There's no learning. There's nothing to figure out how to improve. You we all get a ribbon for participation.
Future Of Selling (47:15.429)
Yeah.
Future Of Selling (47:23.002)
Right. Yeah, to do that, though, to play to win, there's a bit because if I'm playing to lose, right, or I'm playing not to lose rather, or I'm playing for the for, I'm just going to do my best. Those are both drenched with fear from my perspective. Right.
Townsend (47:32.813)
Yeah.
Townsend (47:43.31)
They are saturated with it.
Future Of Selling (47:46.712)
And so the goal is to be able to get rid of that. And here's what I think about. I think about the answer to this question. Well, what if it doesn't work out? Well, there's only two ways to answer that. If whatever I'm thinking about doesn't work out, then I can either say, no, what am I going to do? That's the fear answer. Or I can say, I'll figure it out. Because I will. I always have. No matter what, I figured it out. I've moved on. And I think that
Townsend (48:13.166)
Yep.
Future Of Selling (48:16.996)
frees one to be able to play to win. That's my that that would
Townsend (48:21.198)
Can I give you a little more extreme example or little more, we'll zhuzh that up a little bit.
Future Of Selling (48:24.88)
Yeah, yeah, juice it up.
Townsend (48:28.088)
Somebody says to me, what if it doesn't work out? My answer is it will work out. But what if it doesn't, right? So I gotta slow this down a little bit. But what if it doesn't is something in the future? Well, I don't know the future, right? Was working with a guy once and actually was the guy I told you about with the million dollars and extra, same deal. He was two days away from the end of the quarter and they were behind, they weren't gonna make it.
Future Of Selling (48:48.806)
Okay. Yeah.
Townsend (48:56.492)
And his entire team is all about, we'll do our best. We'll see how close we can get. You know, we'll try to cut our lot. everybody was in that mentality. Now there's nothing wrong with that. What we're protecting is the potential that we might feel bad. But here's the thing, it ain't over till it's over. And what he did, which was incredible, in the last two days of the quarter, he recreated his team. No, no, no, we are going to make it. Now, he didn't see the future.
He didn't know that that was gonna happen, but he created as a declaration, we are gonna make it. So he shifted everybody's mode of play from not to lose to win. And guess what? They made it. They made it past insurmountable odds. And what happens, it's very insidious and it also makes a lot of sense. We start any adventure with your founder, with your sales person, being in the quarter, wherever you are with, yeah, we're gonna do it, I got this, it's gonna be amazing.
Future Of Selling (49:40.252)
They made it. Yeah. Yeah.
Townsend (49:56.056)
Well, then life happens and we get discouraged and we feel bad. Now, nothing wrong with that, but something more insidious happens and that is we start to guard against and protect and try to mitigate future disappointment. So that's what happens when we almost, well, it is subconsciously shift from I'm going to win to not to lose. And it sounds really innocuous. It sounds like, well, that makes sense. But it happens so subtly.
And what I would say is, not only does it reduce your chances of actually winning, even when it looks like you won't, it degrades the entire experience. I'd rather cross the finish line dead last, having in my mind, I'm going to win this race up until I showed up dead last, then halfway through the race decide, well, I'll just do my best. I've lost. The second half of the race is miserable. I'm going to go all, now, I'm not going to say I won when I lost.
Future Of Selling (50:40.54)
Mm-hmm.
Future Of Selling (50:45.648)
Right?
Future Of Selling (50:55.93)
Right. Yeah.
Townsend (50:56.29)
But up until that clock and the buzzer goes off, I'm winning this race. Because to me, that is a fundamentally different experience of the race, even if you lose. Did you Did you lose?
Future Of Selling (51:00.656)
Yeah. Yeah.
Future Of Selling (51:06.191)
Yeah, because it brings a different level of energy, right? In the way you approach it. Yeah, yeah.
Townsend (51:10.062)
Yeah, how'd you do in the race? I lost but only in the last second. Right? Only at the very end. Yeah.
Future Of Selling (51:15.682)
I like that. Yeah, I like that. I like that. Cool. Well, hey, I know we're running up on time and I need to let you get back to your day. Man, I've enjoyed this so much. I'd love to be able to kind of maybe do this again and do some more, know, continue the conversation. But for anybody who's listening today, if there were
Townsend (51:35.318)
I'm in, I'm in.
Future Of Selling (51:40.858)
Let's think about two or three key takeaways. So I'm a leader of a company, maybe I'm an executive leader of a company. I've heard this podcast. like, yeah, you know what? Something, been trying to put this tool belt around myself and everybody else and it seems inadequate. I need some deeper work inside. What are two or three key takeaways you would want them to think about?
Townsend (52:02.84)
Yeah, I'll say, I'll say the first one, and I'll say it with as much love as I can muster, because I've been a founder, and I serve founders. Whatever is going on in your company that you're having the idea this shouldn't be happening, you're creating it. And I don't mean that to shame or blame, but, but at the end of the day, it's you. And it is unlikely that anything you get other people to do will actually change until you figure out how you're causing what's happening.
It's as simple as that and that's really tough to look at as any human but certainly as a founder. So that's one key takeaway. The second is integrity and understanding it and the power of creating agreements. I mean very specific things by this and actually if anybody wants to reach out to me on LinkedIn, I'm easy to find. I have an ebook on agreements. I have an ebook I've done on integrity.
Future Of Selling (52:38.064)
Right? Okay.
Future Of Selling (52:57.998)
beautiful.
Townsend (53:00.45)
You think about these two concepts, if you start to study and practice these concepts, they will, I promise you, they will transform everything in your business. Everything is down, I mean, I will promise money back guarantee, you simply focus on those two elements and you will get what you want. You will get where you want faster, more certainty. I mean, I've been doing this a long time and I've tried it every other way.
Future Of Selling (53:26.682)
Right. Yeah.
Townsend (53:30.227)
I'm done thinking and looking. It's integrity and agreements. Hit me up on LinkedIn. I'll send you the ebook.
Future Of Selling (53:36.038)
Beautiful, beautiful.
Townsend (53:37.454)
I don't know about the third one other than, here's what I'll say for the third takeaway.
Townsend (53:46.624)
I don't know that anybody has a choice whether or not to start thinking about consciousness. And here's what I mean by that. David Shapiro recently did a three series, a three part podcast thing on post-labor economics. And he talked about, I recommend listening to it or dump them all into chat TV and say, me a summary, that'd be fine too. What he said is there's four dimensions on which humans create money out of labor. Strength, dexterity, cognition,
Future Of Selling (54:06.502)
Yeah.
Townsend (54:15.766)
and empathy slash charisma. I'll let you read it all, but what he said is the last stand for us making money doing stuff is empathy. You ain't gonna make money how smart you are. You ain't gonna make money on what you know or how hard you work or even how finely your hands work. So the era of how much you can do and how much more you can do is being handed over to AI and technology.
Future Of Selling (54:40.06)
Yeah.
Townsend (54:40.622)
Right now, the technology exists. If you're a salesperson still thinking, it's what I know and how hard I work, I'm sorry, but you will be out of a job or marginally employed within five years. You want to stay at the top of your game? You're gonna have to learn an entirely different skill set and a different way of thinking about what creates value. And what I will tell you, you start pulling on this thread called consciousness. I've got a sub stack thing that I do a lot of writing on.
you get ahold of me, I'll share tons of resources, because I'm committed to people getting this. You start pulling on that string called consciousness, you are going to be in the top 5 % of the people in this new, brave world. So don't, don't wait.
Future Of Selling (55:22.62)
Yeah, love that. Love it. Okay. Thank you so much for being here today. I have so much enjoyed the conversation. We'll do this again soon and I know and we'll definitely stay in contact. have a great rest of your day and talk again soon. Right. Yeah. Thank you. You as well.
Townsend (55:38.254)
Thanks, Rick. Always a pleasure. Great to see you.