The Truth About Sales, Gen Z & Negative Mindsets w/ Kevin Hallenbeck | Power Theory 010

The most successful people I know will tell you a story of how they got rejected, how they failed, how they didn't get through. Find out what your competition is doing and do the opposite. Yeah, but the challenge is this. There's a lot of fears that limit people's growth. And when it comes to the sales side of things, you don't fix what you're not good at. You leverage what you're good at. And I begin to realize, actually, business happens where the money changes hands. I think there's going to be an evolution of this. Tech will change whatever, LinkedIn, you name it. Today, 30 years from now, everything will be different at one level. So how does a salesperson cut through all that, this dating? The most successful people are people that learn to change their mindset. This is the problem with leadership. A lot of people aren't getting into leadership. Leadership's one of the biggest voids and problems. We don't have enough people to lead. I want people that care about people and are trying to build something of significance that's going to be long term, not people that are looking for a quick fix. But most people don't feel that they can say that because they don't have that personal power. That's really what I want people to have. So here's what I would say, Russ, the other thing that I think is important to recognize today. Welcome back to power theory. My name is Russ Willett. I'm an executive coach and an organizational development professional. My purpose is to allow people to find their power and professional agency for success. Today I have Kevin Hollenbach from Sandler. We're going to talk about generational shifts and how that's affecting future professional behavior. We're going to discuss technology impact. We're going to talk about embracing relationship, the notion of deal making and how we go about making contracts and basically building resistance and confidence in people so that they can realize their full potential. Kevin and I met really early on when I started coaching maybe 25 years ago or something like that. It's great to have you on. I think there's going to be some great insight. Welcome, Kevin. Thanks, Russ. Nice to be here. Tell them a little your story and maybe a little bit about Sandler. I'm been in my business 30 years this year, so I started it in 1994. Before that, I'm an engineer by training. I was in the military, a combat engineer stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, on active duty after getting an engineering degree at Michigan. So I kind of started in the classic engineering side of things. And you kind of have an engineering brain, too, right? I do. I definitely have that capability. But, you know, it's interesting, Russ. I'm a people person at heart. So while I'm good at math and I went through engineering school because math was always easy. It's not anymore, but back in the day, you know, it was no problem. But I found that I didn't gain energy from that like I do being around people. And so at some point, I was hired by a guy, actually, I was hired in the eighties by a guy in a sales job. He wanted an engineer that knew nothing about sales, but had a personality. And he decided I was the guy, and he mentored me. I was with that company about seven or eight years before I left and started Sandler. Sandler is a franchise. It was called Sandler Sales Institute, then Sandler training, and now Sandler. But it's fundamentally a sales training and development, sales leadership, and really revenue generating business. We work with people and teams, typically sales teams, but we'll talk a lot more than that, that need to be more business savvy, win more business, negotiate better, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. You know, talking to someone with your expertise is really important because as far as, I mean, I'm not dealing with salespeople necessarily. Sometimes. Most of the time, this is, you know, CEO's or senior people or people that are on their way up. Sales is a critical component. We kind of frame it as sales, but it's really relationship development and finding value and exchanging value and. Tell me about your family. Well, I married, let's see, 36 years now to my wife, Diane. We raised five children. They're all grown in their twenties and thirties now. Three are married, and we have one little baby granddaughter. We still live in the same house here in New Hampshire. We love it here. And, yeah, life is pretty good. So the first subject here is when we were coming up, not to age ourselves, when we were coming up, we had to, like, talk to people, we had to touch people. We had to go off and find them physically. It was, you know, you had the telephone and you had letters and things like that you can do, but. Can I interrupt you a second? I got hassled this week when I said telephone, Russ, the young people say, what is, you know, it's a phone. Yeah. So, and there's, and I have to be honest with you, when we started texting, I thought I was like, that's awesome. I don't have to have these long conversations with people, you know, but so things have changed. We communicate differently. We reach people differently. What are those challenges, you know, for a professional or even for a sales professional, what are those challenges that you see and how's that going to affect? How does that affect how people do business and how people communicate? Well, so I've been in a professional sales for 37 years, something like that, where I've identified and been in a role that had sales, including the last 30 in my business. When I first started in selling, a technology was a payphone and the yellow Pages. I would fly to a city, St. Louis or whatever, typically would have booked an appointment with somebody, but I had no other additional information. I would literally get the Yellow Pages, which was stuck in. And for those of you that don't know, that was a listing of. There were white pages and yellow pages, and they had the names of this. Again, younger people don't even know what this is. And I would look under a name, and I would get the name of a company. It would have a generic number, so, you know, 444 3200. You would dial that number, you would reach a live person, typically a receptionist, and have the maneuver in there. You had no idea who you were calling or talking to. And so that was the tech. And then broadcast faxing became a thing, and that was the new tech when I first got it. But here's the key. Russ is selling was still about getting a conversation with a potential decision maker, trying to. And I was selling capital equipment. It was computer based, brand new computers at the time. Technology would inspect printing presses, and I would engage somebody in the factory that was printing, and we would have a conversation and would book an appointment, would build some consensus, would do a demo of our equipment, and ultimately, if I was successful, get them to spend $150,000 on a piece of equipment that would help their factory run better. So today, fast forward all that technology is different. Right. You know? You know, and the behavior is different, and the behavior is different. The sociology is different. And so there's AI, there's CRM, which customer relationship management. I mean, again, I first embraced that when it was act and goldmine and maximizer. Those are all names of the past. Now it's HubSpot and Salesforce and Oracle. Right? What's happened is the technology has changed, but all of it, AI, emails and texting, and we'll talk about maybe omnichannel stuff is how we approach LinkedIn, social media. All that stuff matters today, and we still use it, but in the end, Russ, it's still about getting a conversation with somebody. And so the technology on the front lines, if you will, is a little different and how people engage it and what they tune into and where they're listening. But in the end, sales and idea promotion is still about having a human conversation like we're having today, moving something forward and ultimately, hopefully partnering with somebody over a long period of time. Yeah, but the challenge is this. At the time we're sitting here, we're each going to get 50 emails, right? And we'll get some texts, some other, but we get 50 emails and half of these are going to be people that found me on LinkedIn and send me a cold response. And I spend, I must spend five minutes a day just deleting these messages. Right. The noise, just the volume and noise of things. It's gotten to a point of being ridiculous where I don't even trust these sources. Like, so how does a salesperson cut through all that? I mean, I've heard, I've had some people say LinkedIn is a waste of time. How do you break through the noise if you're a salesperson or someone trying to reach other people? Can I give you a Sandler rule, Russ? So I'm a teacher. Go for it. But the Sandler rule, David Sandler, who founded Sandler back in the seventies, and he passed away in 1995, I did know him a bit, but he had a rule that said, basically find out what your competition is doing and do the opposite. And so I think one of the beautiful things, if you're at all creative, is to realize to get out of the noise. You can't be that. And then there was a book, guerrilla marketing. Right. This idea of be different. So I think that's true. And so whatever it is, you've got to stand out in different ways. Now, what I would also say that is part of the reason you get a bazillion emails is it costs nothing to do. It's very simple. And if you send out, if you send out a bazillion. Exactly. A bazillion, whatever that is. Right. And a very low percentage opens and it engages, you're probably successful. So they're just throwing chum in the water. They're hoping that something bites. And some small percentage do. I mean, we hear people get scammed all the time, right. Because they did what, know, responded to the prince of Nigeria, you know, and sent them, you know, wired the money. I mean, it happens. Right? So, so here's what I would say, Russ. The other thing that I think is important to recognize today is that people can be more isolated. Right. You certainly see that in your sociological background. But, but there's preferences. Some people prefer the phone. Some people prefer face to face. Some people prefer an email or a website. So there's different channels that people listen to. I mean, even news channels, people listen to whatever you consider extreme, CNN or Fox News or MN, but people go into their channel and listen to their world. So the question is, if you can get into the channel that people are listening to and you can in a sense, play the right ad that's meaningful and connects, then, then you can get those people. So it's just being LinkedIn works for some people. It doesn't work for others. Facebook works for some. TikTok works for some. Talking to people, walking in cold calling, they're all different. And successful people today have an omnichannel approach that includes a lot of tech, but also low tech. But in the end, it's going to be some blend of those things that really consistently successful people use. And of course, once you get established as you and I are, then the referral machine kicks in and I could virtually go invisible and business would come in once you build the relationships and the contacts. So I've always said that, too. Like, when people hire us to do strategic planning, they say, well, what are the competitors? I'm like, we should find out what the competitors are doing, not because we're going to do what they're going to do, because we're going to do exactly the opposite. And the other thing is you don't fix what you're not good at. You leverage what you're good at. It's all good. It just has to be strategic and it depends on what you're trying to do. Right. I think there's going to be an evolution of this, right? So, like, I think LinkedIn is going to more. It's going to morph into something better. I think at some point, I think there'll be new tools in the future about how to promote people and really kind of match people a little bit better. Like, if, you know, like, we're at a point in our careers where someone needs something and they know who we are or they, you know, they'll call us and they trust us. And there's not like this, it's not like there's a lot of, you know, posturing going on. It's like, you know, you call Kevin, you're going to get Kevin, you're going to get, you know, his services. It's going to be good. You know, like, and I don't think, you know, we don't really have a good way of doing that, but so what's going to happen is there's going to be an evolution, and I think AI is going to be that. Are you all forecasting in the sales channels and the sales vertical, that AI is going to have an impact and it's already, and what's going to, what do those changes look like? Well, I mean, we've written several papers on it, right? So we have, you know, whatever on chat GPT, you know, what are the prompts of chat GPT right now has just been released within the last, what, couple years. But I helped a client yesterday using it. I just, I needed something and I went to it and I got some basic information that was very helpful. And so chat GPT uses when it comes to writing things. So research and writing. Research and writing. And this, in this case, we needed to get a job description. We looked around on Google, we said, hey, let's try chat GPT. And I said, hey, I need a job description. Give me a job description for this type of position in this type of industry in the US. In this case, it's a german subsidiary company. And I gave it a bunch of prompts and it wrote me a job description was pretty darn good. That is a huge time saver. So I think technology, the reason I started with the yellow pages is that was tech at the time. Tech will change whatever, LinkedIn, you name it. Today, 30 years from now, I've been in the, everything will be different at one level. The challenge is at what point did billboards stop working? If they stopped working? There are lots of different ways to reach an audience. And part of the question we have to look at is embracing these tools. The big thing that I think it does now, if you're using, particularly a CRM like I use HubSpot, many of my clients use Salesforce. There are others. The integrations help identify targets and give you information and even information about that person. So research is a big waste of time for salespeople. So rather than spending time researching, I will pay for a tool that will get me a curated, targeted audience that then I can approach on a, on a micro, personalized level that's very different than flying to a town and looking for the word packaging. Yeah. So I have this, I don't know if you've heard me talk about this before, but I have this concept of in the future, someday I'm gonna need someone to do podcast work, right? And so I can go to certain sites now and find these podcast people and they're all posturing, and it's all kind of like a resume. It's a little bit of B's. I'm not sure how much experience they have, and so on and so forth, but I foresee in the future that we're going to be living in the world where most of our employees and most of the people we interact with and we use for our companies are actually going to be on a different model. They're going to be contractors. Not necessarily. They're going to think a little bit more like, independent salespeople. Think, like, I have to prove myself, I have to deliver. Right. So the concept is there, and I think AI is going to allow that to happen in a really robust way. In other words, I'm going to be able to go to the computer and say, I need to find some sales training, right. And it's going to like Chet, and I need to make sure that they work with firms like me, that they understand this approach, they understand this vertical, and it's going to come back and show me two names, right? Kevin will be one, and someone else will be another one. Two names, and there's going to be a rating score. And I'm going to be able to just call Kevin and say, kevin, I'm gonna hire you. You see what I'm saying? Like, I think there's, in the future, we're gonna probably. There's always be a role for sales, but do you see that coming? Yeah, so I do. Where people know what they want and need. Right. So I think if I know that I need consulting, a coffee service, the problem is for more high level, consultative, relational stuff, like a lot of my clients, or let's say I'm working, I work with a couple of SaaS. Software companies. Companies. Software as a service, right. And they develop new technology. People don't know it exists, so they aren't looking for it. They don't know it exists. They don't know they even have a need. It didn't exist before. Who would have thought of a podcast years ago? This is, like, new. And so when you're particularly innovative or when people don't know what they need, there's an issue of disrupting. How do I disrupt? How do I engage somebody that isn't looking for them? He doesn't know they need it, but I can transform their world potentially. I mean, there's a lot in my world, Russ, in your world, there's a lot of mediocre management, if you will. There's a lot of mediocre sales. I mean, there's a lot of companies that are okay, but what they don't know is if they were really good at selling or really did things using these sorts of tech things that we use, their business could be significantly better, more effective, they could win more, higher. They could just kill it. But they don't even know it. They're not looking for it because they're satisfied where they're at. What I love about that answer, though, is it's like, don't look at sales or self promotion or, you know, advancing your career or relationship as just a exchange. Look at it as it's a purpose to help people. It's a purpose to find, to bring value to them. And so, in other words. Yeah, so it's not like, it's not like you're right. If the person that's looking for podcasts doesn't know what to put in there for the podcast, but if they talk to someone like, you know, like Liam or someone else, they're going to get a whole nother insight. Yeah. So I think so maybe in my idea, there'll be a sorting, a little bit, a sorting down, but at the end, there's going to be some listening, there's going to be relationship, there's going to be trust that gets established. And really, I mean, if we, from a selling perspective, I'm looking for a select group of clients just like you are, people that are open to change, really want to do better, have incentive, not people that are just kind of like, I got this guy that isn't selling, fix him. I don't want that client. Now, I could probably do that. And I'm not saying we won't ever take somebody in a truck, but it's shallow. That doesn't really fix the root issue, which is often the business owner or leadership. And so what we have to do, Russ, is be in a place where I don't think it's like there is always going to be search or AI or whatever, but then you're playing the algorithms. But would you, I don't know, would you pick a doctor to perform a key surgery on you based upon, you know, AI or Internet search? I mean, would you, would you pick a lawyer to defend you in a case that was very important, that you were being accused of something you didn't do and was wrong based upon the lowest price or who's got the best Internet ad? No. At some point, it turns into a people to people conversation. And you're right, it's our ability to listen to understand to engage, but it also is the counterpart. It's very mutual. Can your potential client work with you? Are there going, you know, any business person, when I work with the sales team, I'll say, have you ever closed a deal that you wish after the fact that you had never won that became the whatever, the customer, the client from hell. Right. And we've all. Yes, everybody that's been in business for any length of time has had that. So what can we do differently to engage people and really mutually? It's almost like business dating. Figure out whether the right fit. Because the companies I want to work with and I know you work with in management, I want people that care about people and are trying to build something of significance that's going to be long term, not people that are looking for a quick fix. Right. So this is great. So I love the answer because it's adjusting my ideas around this. There is a match, but at some point there does have to be a person to person match of some sort and also a sharing of value that goes beyond whatever you can find in some AI tool that matches you. Research shows that there are people that can participate in exchange and there are people that can't participate in exchange. Let me give you an example. The person that goes to some great big school gets a degree in public administration or, you know, business or whatever, finds themselves working in a hospital or a university or some institution somewhere, and they move paper from here to here and they do the, they do a great job. They do a fantastic job, right? And, or this or the engineer that goes to school and goes work for a big technology company, right? And they're sitting there and at some point in their career, they realize, they want me to sell product, they want me to support the sales team, they want me to, I have to, like, get to know people after work to get a promotion. And this is like, horrifying to them because what they were taught was what they, what they hold on to is I do my job, I keep my nose clean, and I will be successful. But that's not the fact. The fact is, is that, so that's like that, that kind of realm. The other side are the people that see, you know, you said you're a math guy. We've talked about that before, but you're also a people person. They also see that this is a, this is a social game. There's a dynamic of the social reality where we have to influence people. Now, sometimes in the leadership programs we run, we talk about influence. It's like a big deal. And I say things like, how many people here got a job through someone they know, and everybody raises their hand. And I say, how many people think organizational politics is bad, and they all raise their hand. I mean, that's politics, right? That's what you do. But people disconnect this in their head. And what I find the biggest challenge I have, and I tell you, my experience, is that most CEO's or very senior people that I work with have had some sales or marketing or exposure. And the reason why they got there is because they can talk to people and they can trust people and they can understand people and they can influence people, the skill. But the challenge for us is we go into a room full of 30 people, and most of them have not had any training in high school or certainly college around any of this stuff. They might take an organizational development class that tells them, you know, tells you some theories, but there's no, like, you know, how do you influence people? Like, how do you move people? Is it okay, before you go give a big presentation, to call a few people and make sure. I was in a meeting yesterday, and the CEO and I had come up with a recommendation. The CEO changed a little bit. And we got in the room and I said, people aren't going to like this. And I said, you got to back me up. And he's like, I got you. That's a little bit of organizational politics. Him and I came to a meeting of the mines. We pitched it together, we supported, and we articulated it together. And all this to say, I think, that our companies are filled with people that really, when they hear influence, they hear manipulation. When they hear selling your ideas, they hear, I'm a car salesman. And the people that don't participate in that exchange, there's a comfort level to it. I don't ever have to do that. I can take a job in accounting and not have to talk to people, but that's fine, but you're never going to be partner. I can go study law and I can tell you all about the laws, but they say, how come I don't get promoted here? I'm like, well, you have to sell something to get promoted, that you don't become a law partner because you're just really good at the domain. You become a law partner because you influence people. So this is the challenge. And you probably see this when you get hired. You probably come into a company with 50 salespeople, and there's probably like five that are really killing it. There's one that's a rock star, there's five that are really killing it, and the rest are kind of just, you know, and there's a bottom that, or if I go into an organization and I talk to them about, you know, I want to get you promoted. You know, I need the world to see you. You need to promote yourself. And they go like, well, I can't promote myself. So talk a little bit about that psychology. Like, how do you get people? I think you're saying you went to a conference, and most of the people didn't even identify as salespeople, and it was a sales conference. So talk a little bit about that. Well, I think the image of salespeople in our culture is not a good one. Just think of movies. I go, old ones, boiler room, death of a salesman, Glengarry Glen Ross, new one. Wolf of Wall street. Right. Tin Man. I mean, I can just go on and on, but there is, I cannot think of a movie or a show that when salespeople are represented, they're represented a positive. So let's not, let's not be mad that people don't want to be in sales if that's what they think sales is. And so a lot of the problem I deal with is that that preconceived notion that sales is bad or evil or wrong or used cars, snake oil, timesheets. Right. What you and I know, and I think if you go beyond. So that's a transactional sales, where one, there's a winner, loser. That's a very polarizing, I want, and I've been trying, and it does exist. It does exist. It's out there. And frankly, there are car dealerships within a few miles right where we sit right now. That that would be your experience. There are others that are not that way, though. So it's partly a business philosophy. If I'm transactional and I'm a user of you, I see everything is win, lose, and even back to where we started this conversation. I think early in my career, I, I probably saw you as a competitor, and we're not even close to competitors, right? Because whatever. I mean, we both coach, but even if we are, it's such a scarcity mentality of if I win, it's nuts. And when we see abundance in our mindset, there's several quotes that I could use. But abundance is wisdom. And when one sees that one plus one is more than two, when you help others give more, you get more. Emerson's rule of compensation. Ralph Ola, Emerson look up his essays on compensation, but the idea is one changes mindset about what one is accomplishing and how can we work together to do something greater. The whole world changes in your mind. And so I think we have a perspective problem. Once people realize, like, let's just forget sales. If I have something that could help you, that I could provide that would make your life better, whatever it would be, and could offer great value, if we could establish that value. Business is simply an exchange of value, would you be willing to, whatever, put some time, money, energy, and invest something in order to get that value? And if, in fact, that value would change your world, then you would say later on is, I've had many people say, and I'm sure you have in your world, Russ, that's the best money I ever spent. That's the best investment I ever made. Now, when they came in, they were probably like, how much is it per person? What's your price? So it starts so often in this adversarial negative. I don't want to take a sales call, but if we can break through that noise, whether it's the prospecting side or engagement, have a conversation, and if I could actually provide you with value that would be greater than what you would invest, that would be a good return on investment. So, so much of communication, if we take it even outside of the money exchange. So there's the money exchange that salespeople that have quotas have, right. There is that component. But even in an office environment, selling an idea, right. Is really saying, hey, I have an idea. How can we work together? And having a conversation that you, as my boss perhaps says, hey, Kevin, that makes sense. Let's support that idea and make it happen. And then when I deliver on that idea, this isn't magical or a lie, and we really do that, you're like, well, that was a great idea. I'm so glad we invested the time, money and energy to do that. And then you get promoted because you get the reward that sales, even though people don't see it as that. So how did that, but that, so we, again, we all, that's, that's awesome, because that's clarifying. And I totally agree with you. It's like, I think that there's a bad connotation associated with development, sales, influence, whatever that stuff, manipulation, whatever they want to call it. Right. But how do we get people to make that shift? So how I get people to make that shift is the CEO says, you want me to go and join a board? Yes. Well, what good is that going to do? Well, that's going to, you know, promote your brand that's gonna let people see you. You don't even have to, you know. You know, but. But do. I'm not gonna ask him for some. You're not gonna ask him for anything. You're just gonna go and make relationships. Right. It's like, what I do is I have them kind of, I think, like boiling the frog. Right? I just put him. I put him in the water, and they come back and they say, oh, I went to my first board meeting. It was excellent. I loved it. Nice people there. Yeah. Did anybody, you know. No one talked about business. We focused on the mission. Right. And then six months later, they come back and say, oh, three of these people, clients. Now, what happened? Well, they came to me and they said they were like, wow, that would really work. And you can actually like. And I don't even. I mean, I'm not going to name names, but there's a client that I had for a long time who ended up. Who went from, why am I going to be on a board in the medical field? To now he's on the governor's. Like, he's involved in everything you can possibly think of, and it's fulfilling, and it helped his business. And, I mean, it's like there's nothing but win win. And how I did it was boiling the frog and just trying to get them to be comfortable with. Look, you're not trying to sell anything. You're just going to go and provide value and be honest with people and make friends. So what, you're more direct, like, so how would I convince a young professional who's coming up with a high potential to let go of this? I don't want to be a salesperson. I don't want to be. I'm uncomfortable with influence. How would you go about doing that? Well, maybe I just have to demonstrate it. So let's pretend you're that person. Right? I want to say, hey, tell me about your life. What do you want? Where do you want to be in five years? Right. I mean, I would engage you in a conversation to find out what you want. So the danger is, say, how would I sell them? Or almost, how would I tell them? I wouldn't. I would engage them in a conversation and find out if they wanted to ever be a partner, what that would do for them. Right. And so that they see they might want it, I would help them to understand. So I think, let's say board work or charity work is great, but if you're not aligned with that mission, you know, don't join the whatever. Pick your disease that. Your passion, you know, that. You know, hey, because there's an opening on the cancer side of society. You don't care about cancer. I would hope that wouldn't be the case, but I'm just using it as an example or whatever the disease is or you're going to be, you know, you don't like. You don't even like animals, but you try to join the, you know, the animal shelter or the humane society, pick something you're interested in and get engaged. But I think it's a lot of. Some of this is just maturity, but it's moving from a scarcity, and it's not seeing that board as transactional, I think, of many years ago when I first started my sandler business. So back mid nineties, I joined Rotary Club here in Bedford, New Hampshire, where I live and still live, and I joined and I wanted to get business. Right. You know, somebody told me if you join the Rotary Club, it'll get business. And I joined the club, and I don't know, I tried to, whatever, get some appointments with somebody, and I was kind of working the room, if you will. Right. And by the way, other people were joining during that time, too. And I didn't get any business. I didn't. But I started having fun. I started enjoying the people I started. You know, we did whatever, the pancake cooking or the, you know, the sponsoring this or going out and doing whatever the. Because Rotary is really about serving the community and helping. And at some point, I just kind of realized I wasn't going to get any business, Ross. And it didn't matter. I was having fun. I was engaged in the community. I really enjoyed the people that were there then. Many are still there. And guess what started happening? Yeah, the business eventually. But what was interesting, I've seen many people come join it. You know, a lot of insurance, you know, financial planning. You got to join the club. You get in, and they're trying to work it. Why don't we really like networking groups to some degree out, because they're very transactional. And what I think board work is, as an example, it's relational. If you engage people and you enjoy and they trust you, then if they have a need in the space that you're in, they're going to say, hey, Russ, you're kind of a communication management guy, aren't you? I got some challenges in my. Can we get a cup of coffee? And we already know each other, so that doesn't feel salesy, but you've built the trust in the relationship. So. So you basically, you bait and switch them. You trick them, and then. No, I don't. I don't. That's the point. If they don't want it, I'm not gonna try to trick him. You got kids when you want, as a parent, more for your kids than they want. How's that work out for you? You try to tell them what's right. I mean, that's how people are. So when we just. They have to fall down a few times and then come back and say, oh, maybe you're right. Stop thinking about, we know what's best for other people and engage them, then we align, and now we can come up with something. There was a woman that worked in engineering for a Fortune 500 company who was brilliant and smart. She was identified as a high potential. And, you know, they assigned an executive coach to her. I worked with her, and I said, what's the hardest pro? What's the hardest? And we talked a little bit about, I need you to. You need to share your brand. People need to know you. What do you want to influence here? And by the way, your approach is too care about you get there. Well, I care about the company. I care about the mission. I really care about this initiative. And the initiative was, they were having a hard time retaining people at the company. Her engineering department kept losing people, and she realized that there was a. That people were afraid to collaborate. There was a fear, kind of. It was an old kind of company. It was a fear of, like, you know, expressing yourself too much and stay in your lane and that kind of thing. I said, well, you care about that, so I want you to go promote that. She goes, well, how? Who am I to promote this? I said, I guarantee most of the people in this company probably feel the same way you do, or a lot of them do, or people will understand. I want you to go talk to a few stakeholders about it. She says, what are you doing? I said, well, go talk to your boss. Go talk to your boss's boss. Talk to that leader in that department, and just get a feel for what's going on. She comes back, she goes, oh, my God. Everybody kind of feels the same way. They feel like our production could go up if we could collaborate more. And we have the same people talking all the time in meetings, so they end up having an off site. And on the off site, she raised this idea, and the CEO was there, and the meeting went fine. Not many people said anything after she mentioned this idea, which was to kind of infuse this kind of, let's be more transformative, let's be communicative, let's more collaborative. Let's not go up the rank every time we have to do something. Not many people say anything. The CEO comes up to her after the meeting and says, I want you to run that initiative. And she's like, well, you know, she goes and she actually creates a whole initiative. Now, she's an engineering person, and she's actually doing OD work, organization develop. So she runs this initiative and she creates this kind of concept of, you know, if you're an engineer and you come work here, you know, we're going to ask you to step out of your lane. We're not going to punish if you, if you do anything wrong. And it was a lot of, and she ended up changing the company. She ended up getting promoted. She ended up having a great career. And that was just making the switch from, you are capable of doing this. And it's not about selling your ideas. It's just about advancing what you care about. And what you see is obvious how many times we sit in meetings when there's the elephant's in the room and no one talks about it. You just have to be able to do that. That comes back down to personal agency and personal power and making people feel confident and safe about what those things are and kind of like owning your value and then following your passion. So that's the kind of the way that I would approach it, right? Yeah, well, and, you know, to bring it maybe so 100%, I agree with all that. I think to bring it back to the sales question, like, what about sales? I think that there are beliefs that, or mindsets that people have that support things or not. In your example, moments ago, this person you were coaching was at least open and was willing to listen and be coached, right. Instead of saying, I can't do that here. And so there's a lot of fear. And whether the fear is because the company culture is that if you stick your head up, it gets cut off. Right. And shot, you know, so there are very negative cultures and you deal with that stuff. That's not the world I play in. And I, that's why people like you exist and I refer you in and will continue to do so because culture matters a lot, but when it comes to particular roles performing right, so should I. Just because whatever somebody is good at something does, they mean they should do it, right? And there's a lot of fears that limit people's growth. And when it comes to the sales side of things or development, if it's nonprofit world, a lot of those fears are, it's impolite to talk to strangers. Money. We don't talk about money. It's uncommon because we learned that as a child, it's uncomfortable to talk about money. And so a lot of our even childhood beliefs or scripting comes through. And as we are now adults, some of those beliefs work against us to take the next level. And it's also the belief that I'm not worth it. I'm not worthy. Yeah, right. I'm not worthy. I'm stupid. Or if I make a mistake, I'm dumb, I'm ugly. I mean, all of the negative beliefs, and we have a lot of negative beliefs in our head, just naturally, I think there's studies done. Again, you're more in that space than I am, Russ. But by and large, what I find is the most successful people, in sales or otherwise, are people that learn to change their mindset. I mean, we have people. Journal. This sounds like therapy almost, but, I mean, we have people. What are you thinking? What do you want to be thinking to kind of rewrite your scripts? That I belong. For me, when I first had my sales job, I was a young engineer. I mean, I was still getting carded at a bar till I was probably 39. Right? I don't get carded anymore. But I looked young. I was young, I was inexperienced, and I had a confidence issue. Am I not worthy to talk to a manager, much less the president of the company? But over time, has that happened? That changed now, why would I call anybody but the president? I mean, it makes no sense. Let's just have a con. If they don't want to talk to me, fine, I'll find somebody else. It's a completely different mindset. So a lot of I think selling is just interviewing and having conversations with people and figuring out whether there's alignment and not actually trying to manipulate or change somebody to do something, because if they don't want it, it's not going to work anyway. Right. And by the way, that's the way I see influence or sales. It's really just finding the value. Finding the value. You're worthy to find the value with people, and you deliver it. Let's just shift a little bit here. So I do want to talk about how to help people be resilient and accountable, more confident, less hypersensitive. I feel like we're living in a world where president of organization calls me and says, you need to work with Jim, because Jim is you know, he's not polite in meetings. He's too direct. People are uncomfortable with Jim. So I'm like, okay, well, let's talk to Jim. Jim comes to my office, and he's six foot tall, he's bald. He obviously lifts weights. He's very, very deep voiced. And I know immediately what the problem was. The problem was his affect. It was just like, this is who he was, and taught him a little bit about emotional intelligence. And, you know, and he kind of went off and used it and did that. But there's a lot of people that are, you know, I'm being bullied by somebody and I say, well, define bullying. And, oh, he's direct. He's too direct with me. So he's giving me feedback that I don't agree with. And it's almost like we're like. And I don't know if, I'm not saying it's a generational thing, but I, you know, it's. There's a, there's a little less. It feels like there's a little less. And we always want to blame it on somebody else. I'm not making my sales numbers because marketing sucks or I'm not making. I'm not, you know, I didn't get that promotion because, you know, I happen to be a, you know, a white man or, you know, would use whatever you want. Right? Like, and I'm not saying that that's not true. I think there are biases that are in there. But giving into that, if I make, if I didn't get the promotion because I didn't go to the right school, right, that's on me. It's not necessarily. That might be a bias, it might be a wrong bias. But I have a choice. I either accept that or I fight my way through that. I can tell you from my personal experience, almost everything I've tried to get into the first time, I get rejected and then I go back again and I get accepted. That's leadership New Hampshire, leadership Manchester. Other leadership programs I apply. No thanks for us. We appreciate it. Leadership New Hampshire. I actually applied once and got rejected, and then I gave a. Then they invited me to speak at their conference. I spoke at their conference, and they said, hey, why don't you get in the program? I said, I don't know. So I applied again, and I got waitlisted, like, okay. So, like. But I went and I went back again and I got in. Now, you know, I mean, eventually you have to realize that you can't. But I just kept, and I'm not saying that I'm better than anybody else. It's just. I'm just stubborn, and I just had this drive to make, to. To do certain things, but a lot of people just quit. I'm not. I don't like those people anymore. And this happens. This happens in the workplace. Right. I think that it's like we're way too sensitive. And I'm not saying that we should not fight biases or. I'm not saying anything like that. I think that. I think as much as there's a lot of talk about equity, diversity, inclusion, I think it's awesome. It provides. There's a value there. I'm not saying anything about that. I'm just saying, as a human being, the most successful people I know will tell you a story of how they got rejected, how they failed, how they didn't get through. And if we're like, if people in our workplaces are constantly making excuses for everything and just kind of giving up. And this is the problem with leadership. A lot of people aren't getting into leadership. Leadership's one of the biggest voids and problems. We don't have enough people to lead, and people aren't stepping up to lead. And I think a lot of it is because they don't develop the grid or the confidence to be able to do that. You must see this in sales. You must see this in your work. Yeah. Yeah. So, Russ, I think, I mean, you could run a series. You could run a whole multi year podcast on just what you just said. Right. And have many different people. But let me try to unpack it a little bit. I think that there is some generational difference that you're talking about right now. And, you know, younger people have come through COVID. We've all come through COVID, if we're still here, and that's had impact and isolation and everything else, and you talk about kind of this hypersensitivity. But when I work with people that have to sell, like, so everybody has a story of how they grew up in whatever type of family environment, whatever type of community, what was right and wrong, good and bad. Right? We all grow up in some context. And our story, you know, then we reach adulthood, right? And by the way, again, if anybody's ever raised a teenager, teenagers pretty much know everything, right? Or think they do. And I always think that the jump between teenagehood and the twenties, mid twenties especially, I see it's like, ah, I see my own kids. Like, they're different now because they kind of begin to learn, oh, it isn't as easy out there, you know? You know, and so there is a humility and an awareness issue that becomes important. But I'm gonna just give you a couple thoughts about what I think is important. One is, are people curious? I think. I think if you looked at what made great salespeople, what even makes great leaders, is there a curiosity to learn not just stuff, but about people? Like, what's your story, Russ? Tell me about you. How did you grow up? I think if instead of judging people, we were curious about them, it would change the dynamic. And so, again, part of this is just life experience that I have now. Later in my career, I'm fully engaged, having the time of my life. But so much of it is, we can't do this. We can do this. We shouldn't do that. That's a terrible thing to say. Instead of, hey, once I understand you, I begin to have more empathy, and I begin to feel like, oh, I have a good friend who actually has moved away now, and we've kind of lost touch with each other, other. Just over the last couple years. He got sick. Hes moved to California just to deal with his treatments. But we are completely opposite politically, I mean, completely. And we for years would golf together from time to time. And he was a client of mine for a while, and we would actively talk politics and religion, both of which we saw polar opposites. But for my friend, his name is Alan. I learned so much for him, and I respect. And if Alan was running the world, I would trust him, even though politically, he would run it very different than I would, because I know his heart, I know his story. And if I grew up in the family Alan did, and if I had had the experience and if I had been treated the way he'd been treated, I would feel the way he feels about government, about business, about. And so I think that leadership, I think people, I think salespeople, when we start being curious instead of judgmental, when we recognize people are generally the way they are because of their story, and when we can listen to stories, which is what you're talking about there, and we can also recognize that there's different communication styles back here. He's yelling at me. Well, actually, no, he's a high d if you want to use a desk, or he's a certain, you know, Myers Briggs style. What? Pick. Pick whatever your construct is. But the idea is to realize we're all different beautifully. We're all created, and our experience is different. I have five children, and they are in five very different career fields. I think it's fascinating when we appreciate the diversity of life. And I'm not talking about color. It can be that. But I'm really talking about what's your experience that's different. And when we embrace that and really are curious if there's a richness and there's a power, I would last comment then. You could. You could. But one of my favorite books that changed me years ago was a book by Doris Kearns called Team of Rivals. Oh, yeah, I read that. It's a big fat book about Abraham Lincoln. Yeah, I read the whole thing. And Lincoln actually brought his. Imagine that. Whatever. Biden and Trump right now, again, whether we like that or not, whoever, one or the other, the loser was on the cabinet as the secretary of state for the other. That's what Seward had been like, a defeated rival. And so. But what Lincoln did so beautifully, and we need more lincolns out there. He embraced the tension of diversity, and, boy, it was ugly, and they were fought and they didn't agree, but they became a team of rivals. And so I think what the world needs, I think my mission, maybe your mission, is to get people much more engaged and curious and less sensitive in the sense that if I know you, I know you may say something that I find incredibly offensive or vice versa, but if I know your heart, I know your story, I'm going to be more like, you know, I'm an old guy. I say telephone. Right, right. It's whatever. I'm going to say something that I don't mean. The words change meaning. I inadvertently, literally say something that offends somebody. I don't mean to, but if you. You know my heart, you're gonna be, oh, Kevin, look, can I say, please tell me, Kevin, listen, that was inappropriate. Let me know why, so I can hear it and understand. And if I'm open and gentle and open to receive, then I can also change and adjust, and we can have a beautiful relationship, even though we cancel each other's vote and disagree on virtually everything. And literally. I miss my friend alan. Yeah, beautifully said. And I think this is the mindset of, look, the guy, he seems to be coming at me, you know, hey, listen, can you do me a favor? Just tone it down a little bit. You're making me feel uncomfortable. But most people don't feel that they can say that because they don't have that personal power or the confidence to be able to do that. And that's really what I want people to have, because I think that we could solve most of the problems if people were just. So one story, there was a, there was a guy that I was partnering with. This was a long time ago. Great guy. Really. I really like the guy. Really great guy. He says, hey, let's do this presentation together. So we, you know, he said, let's meet at the airport, because he was flying in or something like that. So I went to the airport, and I'm sitting with him, and you know me, Kevin, I'm like, I got a thousand different ideas. I'm like, I'm like, tell him what? We could do this. We could do that. And I'm going at it, right? And he's getting more and more frustrated. I'm noticing, and I'm like, you know, but I'm trying to, I'm trying to get this idea across. And this guy, this guy's wonderful, man, right? No doubt about it. He goes, Russ, why do you have to make everything so complicated? He raised his voice right. And he was a, and I had a little bit of anxiety. I was like, whoa, dude. Like, you know, I felt embarrassed. I'm kind of a little afraid. You use this man voice with me. I mean, I was like, I was, like, sitting there going. And I said, you know what? Why don't we just stop and think about this? We'll get together next week and talk about it. So I used my emotional intelligence and kind of dialed it, and I actually said to him, look, you're making me feel uncomfortable. Didn't mean for this to happen. Why don't we take a pause and we'll get back? So I'm walking back to my car, and the phone rings. He says, russ, I'm really. I apologize, right? And it was because I said that to him, and I just faced him with it. He felt bad about it. And I think that sometimes, I think we're all too sensitive. We're all too afraid to have those honest conversations. Like, someone comes to me and says, you know, bill doesn't like me, or, you know, the CEO won't give me that promotion, or, you know, and I say, go talk to them. It's like 99.5% of the time, you go have a conversation with people and you tell them how you feel about it. And most of the time, you're wrong. Most of the time, you're wrong. Most of the time, they didn't mean it. Or if they did, they. They're corrected. And I think that I'd love to see more of that. Like, people leave jobs because they didn't have work life balance I'm like, well, did you talk to your bosses about work life balance? No, it's a policy not to do that. Well, you didn't talk to anybody about it. Now the company's scrambling around trying to fix work like balance because they just lost their best employee. Like, we just need to talk about it. We just need to. So. But how to get people to there means that we have to. We have definitely change things in the organization, but we also have to build people up so that they have a muscle for this. And they. And in other words, Kevin, you calling me and saying, Russ, let's bury the hatchet. Highly emotionally intelligent, you know, and I don't think you were doing it for value. You just, you know, we had a lot in common. There was things going on. We immediately became like best friends right over the. Over the silliest of things that we let go on for a long time, when really, at that time, if I just said, kevin, what are you doing? I'm not competing with you. I don't care about that stuff. And you would listen to me. You know, we never had the conversation. We just walked away from it. And, you know, I think in any conflict, we just have to own our part of it, right? So each of us had a piece. I think that was more my issue than yours, but you probably had a piece in it. And I think, oh, I had a piece in it. I was mad. I remember thinking, boy, no one's ever, you know, this is a small community. Like what, you know, my piece was not communicating, but that's maturity, that's growth. But two things for us, I think, are important as we think of development. Now we're talking about how do we help people to change and grow, whether they're salespeople or sales leaders in my world, or whether they're whatever the production manager in your world or other leaders that you work with. I think there's the issue of self awareness and humility. Like, how do I impact others? What's my own, we call it head trash, but what are my own beliefs about people? Like, I don't like this type of person, or I can't work with that, or they're all against me. And that gets amplified in our society by social media and Twitter and all Democrats are this or Republicans are that or this. You know, and there's all these labeling. So we have to be aware of how that impacts us. And then the second thing is, I think there's a real gap of skills, particularly in the younger generation, to understand, like, people are different. And we talk about, we think, differences, like whatever, the classical Dei stuff. But really, I'm saying, take whatever you said earlier, white guys, take all white guys. We're actually all different. Right? Take all, whatever. Pick any category. So it's not about, yes, skin color or sexual preference or whatever. The thing is, we'll put you in a group that will cause you to be, maybe have some affinity in some things that way, in one way or another, but you're still different, even if there were three of any bigger group. So I think this is the curiosity, but learning about different styles. Be a student of people. The best leaders, the best salespeople, the best communicators, actually are curious, and they're learning. So learn the disc model. Learn Myers Briggs, learn the five dysfunctions of a team. Be a reader. Develop and learn. And then have the humility to say, what about me? What's my part in this? And how do I need to continue to improve and be a better listener? And what I find is the less I say and the more I listen, the smarter people think I am. Yeah. And actually, to some degree, that's really wisdom. And when even back to your example of this guy, where you were telling him everything, you know, probably from your perspective, that would set him off, and he got upset and made you uncomfortable, but really, you probably had, you said a little less. You stopped and said, hey, how do you feel about that? Even once or twice during the conversation. That was your. You were in it. Exactly. He was in it. You both had a little thing, but once you got separated, you were able to come back. And I think it is having the emotional intelligence in the moment to recognize it. And the more aware we are of others and the more present we are, wherever we're at, the more effective we are in life, in every aspect of it. And that's true for salespeople, it's true for leaders. It's true for, you know, partners in a marriage. Yeah. So great points, Kevin. I want to, just like, you know, you mentioned humility. I think that all the problems in the world can be solved with if someone comes to me and says, how do I really find my power? How do I really find my personal and professional agency? It's about humility. I know what I know. I know what I don't know, and I'm going to be honest with those things. I'm going to be respectful all the time, which means even the things we're talking about, if there's any problem that I'm faced with, and I ask myself. The question, what's the respectful thing to do? The answer is so clear, it's like the next right thing to do. Is this right care? You have to make sure you're taking care of people, the values you spoke about. Like, we want to make sure that we approach things with a sense of another human being who also has struggling, has needs, whatever's going on, and just like we do. And we have to be able to recognize those things. I think if, you know, if you can do those and express yourself, you have to practice expressing yourself, saying what's on your mind, talking about what you want. Don't just, like, make assumptions about that. If you do those things and you practice those enough, they become like an extra muscle that, you know, and I think, and I'm not talking, I don't want to talk about this as an age thing, but just maturity. I know 20 year olds that do this, that are capable of doing this, but I think as we mature, we realize, wow, not only do I not know what's going on, no one knows what's going on. Right. And so meet people where they are. If they're struggling, if they having a bad day, you help them out. If they're not hitting their numbers, you have a choice that you got to try to get them past that. Anyway, so that's that. Thanks. That was a good conversation. There's another subject that I'd like to bring up, and that is about, and it's like a bunch of years ago, I got hired by a university, you know, and I got the president of the university. I met this person that brought me in. I met the president of the university. The president of the university says, my executive team is just, you know, not, it's not where it needs to be, you know, Russ, can you come in? And, you know, and I sat in the meeting with the executive team, and I was just, like, empowering them and telling him, this is good. This is not bad. And I'm like, and then, and I'm just kind of doing my thing. And they were all like, wow, this is great, you know? And the president says, all right, let's go. I want to hire you. And then the CFO says, oh, we have to do a competitive bid. And the CEO says, well, we don't. You know, this is not that. This is just a consulting with us. No, we have to be competitive. And the president was irritated about this, but he said, basically, arrest. I'm sorry. We have to do a competitive bid. Can you do a bid? So I go back and I spend, what, 10 hours writing, you know, this document that follows their flow, right? It's a ten page document that I submit to them. And, you know, then I. Okay, we have interviews, and I'm sitting in. I'm sitting at, like, at the university, sitting in the waiting room with four other firms. This is like, what am I, a marketing company? Like, no. Like, so. And I get it. Right? I kind of get it. But I almost think that's such an old fashioned model. It's so. It's just so old. How much money do they waste doing this competitive bid? Now, I know that that's their rules, and I totally understand that, but it's old fashioned. It's a waste of time. It's a waste of my time. In the end, they brought me into the meeting and I'm. And the president's like, well, let's just do this. And the CFO was like, no, we can't do that. And the president was like, well, I'm gonna figure out a way to do. Like. He was, like, visibly upset that I couldn't hire me, and they ended up giving it to somebody else. It was a. It was a retired college professor. Like, whatever. So that was a waste of my time. I was never gonna win that bid. I just recently got called from a big firm in Maine. They wanted me. You've been referred to us. We would like you to do a strategic plan for us. And I sent over the RFP. I'm like, well, you know, how many people are you going to. Well, going to a select group. Okay. All right. So I get this RFP, it's 15 pages long with a. With, you know, this is going to take me two days to write to respond to the thing. And there was about, I don't know, 180 employees at this company. So it's kind of. It was kind of big. And I understand that they have their rules. You know, they had their mindset. Anyways, I thought about this for two weeks, and I finally wrote back and said, listen, I'm not the guy for you, you know? And my thinking is, if they can't do an RFP or they can't go through a process like this, what's it going to be like for me? We talk about clients, you know, we glad we missed. I mean, did I dodge a bullet? Maybe not. And also, my vision of strategic plan is a simple thing. It's not that complicated. These people are making everything complicated. So to make my point here, I'm sorry about going on so long, but you can see that it's kind of annoying, right? So I pass on those things. I'm not wasting my time. In fact, if they wanted to do a proposal, they wanted to go through that. If they paid me a couple thousand dollars, I'll do the proposal. But I'm going to give them all my, I'm going to tell them my methodology. I'm going to tell them everything that I'm going to do and I'm going to, I'm not going to win it anyways because I'm a small firm in New Hampshire. Right. I believe that if I think of the future and we think about AI and we think about matching people, just like with sales and products, eventually you have to get that into a conversation. But the contract should have been in both those cases. We're going to hire Russ and if he sucks, we're going to get rid of him. And the problem is these contracts are made so you can't get rid of people. The mindset is if I hire you, Kevin, and I sign a big contract, I'm stuck with you. And the thought is it protects you and it protects me, but it doesn't protect us. What should happen is let's bring Russ in, let him do a meeting with the executive team. We'll see how he performs, we'll see if we like him, if you like his approach, and then we'll go to the next step. Right. That's what we should be doing. So I don't know if you have, in your sales world, your people are writing proposals all the time. Right. So what's your thought on all that? Well, let's pretend you had a problem with your knee and you went to the Internet and you diagnosed it based upon everything you did, and you decided that, yep, I probably have a problem with my cartilage and I need to get knee surgery. And you put out a RFP to all of the knee surgeons in the area and said fill out the RFP and let's pretend that they played along, which they wouldn't have and why wouldn't they play around? Because they're experts in their field, because they're professionals and they wouldn't give you a solution without a diagnosis is the real issue. And so anyway, and then they cut on your knee. Would that be the best outcome for you? For knee? No, because first of all, you're self diagnosing, which is problematic in and of itself. So secondly, you're turning it into potentially a price game. And most RFPs are run by financial people who are trying to save money and you ask them for their budget and they say they don't have one, which is, I would argue, adversarial by nature. So they do it to protect themselves. Because of what we talked about early, kind of the stigma of sales. We can't be sales. People screw us. We have to protect themselves. So that's the bias of it. But in the end, it does not serve anybody well. Now, I would say that government work, you know, the town, there are requirements. There's reason to have RFP if you're doing the Defense Department and their stuff. But in the end, even there, if you really want to build a relationship, if I'm hiring you for something, I want you to make money. Why? Because we want a fair value and because I want you to be around for me three years from now. If, if you, I get somebody to go the lowest price, I mean, that's, the person that sells it to them, doesn't deliver. I mean, the horror stories that the Internet memes about buying on price are out there. But I believe it comes from the distrust of sales and it's often driven by financial people. And the reason the president in your example was so frustrated is because he or she was uncomfortable and felt like, no, I want some. This is not easy. It's not like that. Right? That's not, we're not buying a commodity. But even if you were buying coffee cups, I would argue that, yes, you want it to be competitive. I'm not opposed to getting a couple prices to make sure that something is within the range. But should you buy the cheapest? The answer is probably not. And so within context, I think generally speaking, if you get an RFP request for proposal or request for, quote, whatever it would be, and you've never heard of the company before, first of all, you shouldn't do it. You should pick up the phone, the old fashioned phone. The old fashioned phone, call them and basically say, why are you sending? And have a conversation with somebody? And most of the time you'll figure out very quickly, that is, it's a, it's driven by the wrong reasons. And in the end, even if you got that work, it would be very transactional by nature. So I would generally walk away from those. I work with salespeople all the time. Oh, my gosh, it's a big company with the big whatever, Walmart's of the world or whoever. And I'm not being specific about Walmart. It could be any big company. But certainly in your example, 180 person firm, that is proposal that they would even do that it actually shows, again, culture and mindset that probably is not partnering with people that can transform their world. Exactly. So for you, or I wouldn't even begin to play. I think, again, if you're selling coffee cups, paper products, more commoditized stuff, you're going to deal with that world. But even then, having competitive advantage, there's ways to do it with getting last look, there's. Right. Even in your example, let's say you decided to play at that university to at least get the president to make sure that before they awarded it somebody, they would give you last book, meaning you could see it, have a conversation. There's ways that you can position for some competitive advantage. But more often than not, Russ, it's going to be, yeah, what I call in the construction world, chuck in a truck competing against a legitimate firm that doesn't have the right insurances that can, says they can redo your roof for less. And there's a lot of risk. There's a lot of that. So a lot of risk for them. A similar firm, the same kind of firm, 100 employees hired me a few years ago, and this is how it went. Russ, we know who you are. We'd like you to do a strategic plan for the company. I'm like, listen, I've not worked in that vertical before. I've done strategic planning, but not in that vertical before. So I'm not going to be an expert in your, in your area. And let's see if there's a law firm. Right? I'm not, I'm not in that vertical. That's okay. That's why we want you. We want you because you're not in a law firm vertical. You're going to tell us the business stuff. I'm like, well, you know, I don't have, you know, I was pretty honest with them and humble about it. They're like, no, we want you. So I gave them the price and they took the price. They looked at it. They said they pushed it back and they said double that. Like, so I didn't even, you know, that's how new it was to me. And that turned out to be a fantastic client and a great experience for both of us. And they, they took me for what I was. They, you know, based on reputation, you know, they were willing to play business and my business was better, and I worked harder for them. And I think that, I just think that, you know, I don't know if companies realize, like, how much we understand how foolish that is. And they, and I know that they and I think they have to get away from that. If that company had called me and said, russ, we're interviewing three firms. We want to interview you first. Come. I would have went, I would have interviewed them. I would have had a better idea about what's going on. They could have seen my style. I could have told them my. Without documenting it, and it's an hour and a half drive and a couple hour meeting, and I decide what I want to do. They would probably have a better result. So I don't know how I think this is going to change in the future. I'm not sure. You don't think so? No. I think people value is what we have to establish. This is what we do in communication. People need to understand their value. The way you interview the doctor for the knee surgery isn't by even looking at the degree stuck on the wall. It's to have a conversation. How they treat you, bedside manner, do they do the diagnosis? Do they prescribe us solution that makes sense? Do they help you along this journey? And so establishing value when they don't value you or value what you do is not easy to do. So we have to figure out pretty quickly from a sales perspective, can I have a conversation with somebody that will value me if they don't and they're, do you want this? We're a big company. Give us our product, walk away from it. Because the problem is with, when you do the cheap stuff, and again, you buy the business or you play the game, you just set yourself up for a cycle of that forever. And when you say, no, I'm good enough now. And look, when you're brand new in business, sometimes you got to do what you got to do. You take the job. I can think of deals I did early on that I would never in a million years do today. But you know what? I'm grateful, because I learned a lot. I got practice, I got reps. I learned some stuff. I undersold myself. But really, they probably paid me what I was actually worth at that time. But once we know our own value and we communicate that through conversation, asking questions, they're like, I want you to be the one. Because especially for professional service providers, it's actually preposterous for professionals to go through an RFP. Would you hire a lawyer that way? You wouldn't hire lawyers. Kevin, do you know a guy that's specialized, oh, I know this guy. He's great. You talk to that guy, and you're usually off to the races. So it's like, no, the point of this discussion isn't necessarily about how to sell it. It's really more about, I want companies to realize that they're leaving a lot of value on the table. They're doing it wrong. Right. I think that I had associate guy I know for a long time, he's said he was going to start a website that started evaluating people that hire people, that hire other people, other firms, ad agencies, we'll tell you the truth set of how they handled us and treated us in the process. But as a joke, he was saying that. But yeah, I think that in my vision of the future, business is going to exchange a lot faster, which means that this kind of b's is just going to have to change. Yeah. You know, I think people are still people, Russ. And I think to circle back to the beginning of our conversation today, the technology may change and people have a new app that screens out potential salespeople. Or you put your things up and there will be changes. Right. There will be stuff like that. But in the end, you know, value is really tough to, you know, it reminds me of the story of the. I don't know, I've heard it several different ways. I don't know how it is, but, you know, the old guy that somebody, whatever, they're trying to fix a big turbine or something in some place, and they can't, and they try everything. They can't figure it out. So there's this old guy they call that's been in business forever, and they call him and he says, you know, he says, okay. He walks over and he looks at it a little bit, and he gets his bulping hammer, whatever, and he taps in a couple spots. The thing, oh, I heard this. Yes. And then he gives the invoice and it's ten grand or whatever it is. And they're like, you just spent a minute. And he said, well, let me itemize the invoice, right? And the invoice is, you know, 30 years of experience. And then, you know, I charge this 9999 and it's a buck for the hammer tab. So I think. But I think that the point of that is a good lesson, right? It really is about understanding your value and what's. I mean, I don't charge by the hour for what I do ever. Right. It's not about or the training program. Like, if I help a salesperson double their sales, and we've done that many times, or even just take a sales team and have them go 20% better, which is pretty well, actually. Those are average results. Like, you can do a lot better than that. But let's just say now depends on the team. There's a million different variables. But if I take a team that's producing a million and they get 20% better, or 10 million get 20% better, when you think of the profitability for the company, what's the difference? What you pay me as a. It's a small percentage. And so the question really is, if I can provide the value, we move out of this transaction of what's the price per hour or per pound or per whatever the measurement is to more, what's the value? And we can't always frame it that way exactly, but that's what salespeople do. This coffee cup, even as unimportant as it may be, we're sitting in a professional services firm, and the experience that people have when they hold this coffee cup and the quality actually communicates a little bit about the type of firm that we're sitting in. And so maybe this matters. And sure, you could buy the cheapest stuff that's got some printing on it, as opposed to plain vanilla. And I'm just using that as an example. If we put it in context and this creates part of the cost customer or the guest experience, then this is not a commodity in the same way that it was when you started to go buy coffee cups. Good. Yeah. I want to share with you one story. I don't know if I've shared this before. So, I was a business analyst at Raytheon for a long time. I got into finance. I negotiated contracts with the US government. I used to write these proposals. I used to go and negotiate these contracts, transitioned into organizational development. It was never about influencing anything or ever selling anything. You know? I had a successful stint on the organizational development at Raytheon, but I needed to kind of expand, so I left, and I went to a company selling consulting services. So my first job outside the corporation, and the partner, who was inspiring, said, we got to take solution selling solution selling course. So I went to the course, and I remember being petrified, and he wanted me to go, like, call executives and go to Boston and meet with them, you know, like, you know, financial services firms. And to me, it's like. It's like, all new. I don't know anything about financial services. I don't know, you know, so I go. I go to take the solution selling class, and it was like, wow, this is. This is kind of like organize in a way that I can understand, teach you how to have a conversation with people, how to how to find the value. And I'm only bringing this up because I really think that, you know, when you came and worked with our firm and, you know, we're a bunch of, like, you know, highly educated people that work with people, right? Like we're, you know, we're. We're more high touch. Right, like that. Right. And we have to go off. But yes, you are all kind of nerds in your own way. We have to actually go off and convince people to hire us, you know, and I remember when we did some of that training, and my team would pull out that little card you gave us. Yeah, yeah. What's the budget? And I sit there in meetings and Heather would ask me, asking these questions. You know, it was. It just really helped. People should really. And even if. Even if you're not in a sales role, I think it's really good for people to kind of have to have that experience, you know, to maybe get some, you know. Yeah, I think, look, people need to learn stuff. And so if you're a professional and you want to be a partner in your firm someday and you're whatever, a junior person there, if you're new in any business. Look, I'm an engineer by training. I practiced after I was in the army for a bit, where I got some leadership training. But I was hired into mobile chemical, now part of ExxonMobil, in a plastics factory. And I did that for about three years leading. And I began, and I got into engineering. I thought, I want to be where business happens, and that's where the product is made. But I began to realize that I had people calling on me. Sales people sell me stuff. I was in charge of the plant. They would sell me a compressor or whatever I needed. And I began to realize, actually, business happens where the money changes hands. And that's true whether you're a professional services firm. If you're ever going to make partner, it's going to be your ability to get business nonprofit, it's going to be your ability to raise revenue, get donors and volunteers, which is all a sales job or sales, where it's revenue and selling something. I mean, it doesn't really matter. It's the same skill set. And it's about learning about yourself, your awareness, recognizing others, getting comfortable and confident, and then, yes, following a process, a methodology. That's what teach people. And there's plenty of good ones out there, but it's putting it all together and then being organized and systematic and using the tools like AI that are coming. And when you do that well, and you continue to learn and continue to grow and you continue to iterate. This is a great career. I mean, it's fantastic. It's fun, and life will change. If you get locked in a time and you stop changing, I don't care what you're doing, eventually the world will leave you behind. Yeah. Well, this is great. I totally enjoy our friendship, and I've commented before. When COVID started, I remember sitting in my lonely house thinking my business was gonna fall apart. And the phone rings, and it's Kevin said, hey, Russ, I'm just checking in on you. And I knew I was probably on your list to call, but maybe. But it meant a lot to me. The other person that did was Dan Scanlon. He also did the same thing, and I started doing that, too, but it meant a lot. So appreciate the friendship. I really appreciate you spending some time, you know, thanks for having me, sharing your wisdom and stuff. So if you're interested in helping your team grow, hiring salespeople, business development or development people, if you're looking to just scale and systematize and leverage the newest, latest, and greatest, love to have a conversation about how we might help you. That's great. Thanks. Thank you.See all