Transcript

JIM:  Hi, I am Jim O’Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops. Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out. Markets go up and down, research is presented, and then refute it, and we find ourselves right back where we start it. The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think, and how we might be able to change that.

To avoid going in infinite loops of thought. We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens, including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis. And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.

With each episode, we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together. Thanks for joining us now. Please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.

DICSCLAIMER ANNOUNCEMENT: Jim O’Shaughnessy is Chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O’Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate. All opinions expressed by Jim, Jamie, and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of O’Shaughnessy Asset Management.

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as basis for investment decisions. Clients of O’Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

JIM: Hello everyone. It’s Jim O’Shaughnessy with my colleague Jamie Catherwood for another episode of InfiniteLoops.

Today, one of my favorite people and also my first second time member of the podcast club, there was one who did a group one and then we did ’em individually. But you, Adam, wow, are the first to be the repeat guest, which we are delighted about. I don’t really think I need to introduce you. I think you are everywhere.

Everyone is interested in what you’re saying and doing and today when we did the last podcast, we both agreed that we should do just an entire podcast for sales. Yeah. Yeah. It’s so interesting to me. I come on, you know, from the quant side and a lot of people, I met a lot of quants. They disdain sales. Oh well that’s sales.

And I would look at ’em and I would say, You don’t really understand. You’re selling something to me right now, whether you like to call it sales or not. Everybody is in sales. Do you have a girlfriend? Often? Unfortunately they didn’t and it was like maybe what you need to understand is if you want a girlfriend, you wanna get married, you wanna have friends, you are in sales and what it really is persuasion, right?

ADAM: I wouldn’t say persuasion, but I know what you mean by it. I don’t think necessarily sales is persuasion, but I don’t wanna interrupt you man. You are on a roll.

JIM: No, no, no. You’re the guest. I want your perspective on this.

ADAM: So I’m gonna respond to the whole persuasion thing cuz I do think about that sometimes.

I should also give a little bit of background on myself.

Jim: Please, please do.

Adam: I knew from the time I was a very young kid that I loved sales. I knew it because I think I had an understanding that I had a little bit of charisma. I had a very good ability to communicate kind of abstract type of things. I liked science fiction and I kind of liked, I don’t know, I guess in sales it would be kind of more intangibles, but kind of the narrative of things I really, really enjoyed.

And I think I did a very good job as a kid writing it down and being a very imaginative little kid, I always knew kind of what my career trajectory was gonna be. And I always knew that sales was gonna be a big part of it. And then I did very well and sales was a big part of that, both on Wall Street and starting my own companies and then going to venture capital route and now where I just kind of look for trouble around the world.

So I’m kind of like McGyver, except I don’t have any of the instruments. I just got locked up and pleaded for my way out. So when I left working for a company, my company’s iPod, I started thinking a lot more about sales completed because I want to start transferring it over. So when I was in the sales business, so to speak, you can transfer it over, but you can only do it very piecemeal because at the same time, although I wouldn’t say these are your competitors, you do have to kind of hold a little bit back.

And even though I had large teams and I would try and transfer as much as I could, there’s only so much you can do at the same time within that structure. So you’ve gotta just find one or two people, bring ’em under your wing and just kind of walk them through it. I didn’t until, I guess I was kind of similar to it in 2012, so maybe 2013 started trying to think about it more completely as a philosophical system because a lot of CEOs that I had known throughout the years also were asking me about how to grow their companies.

They were just calling me up all the time, and I decided I should really start kind of formalizing this, memorializing this also for my own benefit. When you transfer that onto paper and you get a chance to think about it, you realize the complexity and elegance of sales that is as much of my background as might be helpful to this and that I’ve started turning it into much more of a philosophy around the time that people actually asked me.

CEOs were saying whether they be startups or CEOs in very large companies and in sometimes fairly frequently, is actually it was publicly traded companies were now having to make the transition from venture capital, which was very closely held, and there wasn’t a lot of visibility into earnings. Now all of a sudden they were being publicly traded and they were hiring a lot of prestige head of sales who really couldn’t make the transition from the venture capital world where it’s all just about kind of getting to size and now to the point where you have to have a pricing discipline when you’re a publicly traded company, you need a lot of pricing discipline.

It needs to be a very rigid system, and it needs to be kind of cascaded down from the CEO culture on down that this is what the pricing is and a lot of things that they could get away with earlier, such as letting the client decide on what the pricing is and then just saying, okay, if you’ll sign on the dotted line, we’ll give you that price.

Can’t do that when you’re a publicly traded company as much anymore. So I started kind of formalizing it then because I was having the same conversations with people over and over and over again about how to increase pricing, how to renew clients, what is kind of the formula for when clients are renewal, how should it be handled, should it the salesperson be doing it, and kind of creating this whole system.

And a lot of what works in venture capital does not work in the real world when there’s real accountability.

JIM: That’s really interesting. And maybe we could go through, I’m sure you’re familiar with neurolinguistic programming, right? Yeah, yeah, very. I actually had couple who did that. Yeah. Yeah. Pacing and leading and, and all that kind of stuff.

But let’s walk through. A kind of a step by step, and keep in mind there’s gonna be a lot of people listening that this is their great goal, this is what they want to get good at. I don’t know that there’s any great book on how to be a great salesperson. I think there must be, but I don’t know ’em. You could probably write one, but let’s go step by step and take me through a sale from initiation of the relationship to making the.

ADAM: Okay, well you’re starting very late. You’re starting at from the time that there’s a, a sale, I would say you started at, if it’s one to 10, you’ve already started on the eighth peg.

JIM: Wow. Okay. So you start on the first one for me then.

ADAM: So the first one is, I wanna be responsive to what you said about quant fund managers and everybody else. A lot of lawyers too, who say that they don’t like sales and they have this contempt and it’s usually they’re kind of jerky. To be honest, if you, for me as a salesperson, okay, it has to become part of my identity that I embrace. So I’m really not trying to persuade anybody because there’s a manipulative element to persuasion that I don’t wanna do.

I don’t wanna kind of realign somebody’s thinking. I don’t wanna kind of adjust it accordingly. I’m not trying to do that. I don’t think that’s really what sales is. So there’s two types of sales. Then there’s kind of transactional sales, which is where you go a drug store and you buy this item. and you say, you know what?

That person was very helpful. They smiled, they walked me to the product shelf and they put it in my hand and they had that discretionary effort. And so when I leave that store, I say, you know what? That was a good salesperson. I like them. That was a very pleasant experience. So that’s one type of sales, transactional type of sales.

That person has their discretionary effort. They didn’t have to walk you to the aisle. They didn’t have to ask smile. They didn’t have to perhaps put the product in your hand or ask if there was anything else they could do to help you. That’s all their discretionary effort. That’s not part of their job description.

In that sale. They’re expending a lot of their own kind of emotional reserves, their own intellectual reserves. They’re depleting a little bit of themselves. Does that make sense to you?

JIM: It does, yeah.

ADAM: Even though it may not seem it, they are giving up that little sliver of themselves for the smile, for the walk.

Now, they might enjoy it. They’re gonna enjoy it because that’s who the person is. So that’s the transactional sale. Then there’s the kind of bigger, the professional sale, it’s the same amount of discretionary effort. There’s substantive differences in that. One is the transaction is very short. There’s a very short sales cycle.

It’s probably around 22 seconds. The person is coming into the store looking for that item and you are just kind of a tour guide. Clearly, that person has part of their identity is the pride of their employment because they’re clearly very welcoming you into a store that’s not their store. They don’t own that store, so their identity is not attached, is not fixed on that.

They own this premises and they want it to be beautiful and it’s the whole housekeeping type of thing, and you’re their guest. There’s just something in that person that has that discretionary effort. So the professional salesperson, which is me, has to have that as well. You might be the customer who walks into the Rite Aid or whatever.

I think of Rite Aid cuz my wife just went to Rite Aid. Who you might be that quant manager who just walked in there into that place, you are just gonna be as rude to that person as you would be. To me, that’s your identity. And I’m not speaking of you.

JIM: I was gonna say that’s not my identity.

ADAM: Oh no, no. And I know because we had lunch.

You’re such a thoughtful person. But that person who’s gonna be rude to the salesperson is also gonna be rude to everybody else on their periphery. And that’s because their identity, what they’re selling to themselves is some type of an elitist type of, I’m better than that person is. I’m never gonna be able to challenge that.

I don’t desire to challenge that. So that person in the right age store is in trying to elevate their own social status. To that persons as though they’re presenting themselves as a peer. They just want to get the transaction done. And because the transaction is so brief, it doesn’t really give that quant manager or that lawyer a chance to present any difficulties or obstacles.

They just want to get the item put in their hand and walk outta the store. Professional sales, the first step you started on eight. I wanna start on one. So if we’re on an assembly line, you’re already kind of far down, you’re deep into the assembly line processes. We first have to start with the person’s identity, the salesperson’s identity.

Why are they selling what they’re selling? So we can even start there. Do they actually believe in the product? If they don’t believe in the product, then they’re gonna rely too much on persuasion. And persuasion has some deceptive elements to it, because that’s what persuasion is. We don’t wanna do that.

So I would say peg three, before we even go to peg one, working our way backwards, is they have to believe in what they sell. That might even require the selling the product to themselves. Where is the value in that product? Otherwise, I wanna know that if I’m selling something to Jim, I can genuinely say this is gonna improve your life in some way.

Insperity, where it’s a PEO, there’s a lot of things that you’re presenting to. Jim gonna transfer a lot of the risk of being the employer onto a P E O. You’re gonna be able to give your employees better benefits, better medical, you’re gonna be able to attract and retain. And there’s also gonna be a cost saving element, but you’re not actually gonna be seeing that cost savings.

We’re gonna save you money on the cost of benefits. That cost savings, you’re not gonna capture because it’s also gonna be kind of the cost of our services. But what I’m genuinely trying to sell you is an improvement in your life and in your business, and I have to believe that. And if I can’t believe that, then I am relying on books. I’m relying on pamphlets. If I can’t genuinely believe that, then I need to bolster myself with a lot of books and pamphlets and everything that tells me how to sell a product.

JIM: We are completely simpatico there. We believe, deeply believe in what we’re doing. So much so we put our name on the door. That’s another way to signal, Hey, here we are.

I could not agree with you more on the need to believe in what you’re selling. At least for me, I don’t think that I could, if there was some kind of new product and I tried it and I thought it was awful, and then somebody said, Jim, will you go out and tell people about this? My answer’s gonna be, no, I won’t because it’s tied to me and I don’t believe in it.

And it also gets to that whole idea of, I talked to a lot of young people, right today, and what you see a lot of is, I need a brand. I need a brand. The advice that I give them is, no, you need a personality. You need to be authentic, and that’s your brand. They’re like, oh, I think it gets to your point of you don’t need it in books.

The only place I would differ with you is that I’ve learned a lot by reading books like Influence and those types of books. Not for any nefarious purpose, but it does help. I look at it as table stakes. You gotta believe what you’re telling somebody, but then there are certain ways that you can convey that information to them that are gonna click with them more.

So, for example, if you read N L P Neurolinguistic programming, you learn that people are three types of beings. They’re visual, they’re auditory, or they’re kinesthetic. Let’s say you’re a visual person, and I say to you, Adam, don’t you hear me? Can’t you hear that bell going off? Well, you know what?

Literally the way your brain processes things, the answer is no. You can’t. If I in turn say, oh Adam, can’t you see the big picture and suddenly you engage? I kind of look at that as almost a courtesy to people that I’m trying to communicate with. The way I interpret the world is not gonna be the way other people interpret the world.

And I think you need to understand, and I think you do, and I wanna hear you kind of riff on this, you need to be able to communicate where the other person actually can process and hear you or see you or whatever. Do you agree?

ADAM: Yeah, I do. I definitely do agree and I understand why books, there’s some kind of an expediency, I guess, to using books. It’s just that you have to be very cautious because again, we have to start a little bit earlier. We have to start where a, the salesperson has established within their own identity that they’re selling something. . So it has to start with kind of a recognition of within you. And I just were speaking right before this began about Tesla and in fact we were talking about Tom Cruise.

JIM: one of your favorite subjects.

ADAM: Yeah. I told you why. It’s interesting.

JIM: I love your theory. It’s great.

ADAM: Yeah. Yeah. So a person has to kind of embrace who they are first, and a lot of people who that I’ve spoken with, just as you have over decades and decades, one of their difficulties that they say in selling is that they themselves don’t like to sell.

So when you say, you know, Adam, walk us through a sale, and then you’re like, okay, you’re sitting down in front of the prospect, that’s the ending, that’s past. By the time I’m sitting in front of them, I’m probably gonna make that sale. I’m telling you right now, I’m really good at what I do. I know the mechanics of what I do.

If I’m already sitting in your office, the sale is pretty much done.

JIM: So lemme stop you just for a minute and let me translate. Tell me cuz I’m here, I’m listening to you. I wanna play it back to you, and I want you to tell me whether I’m right or wrong. In other words, whether I’m listening right or if I’m hearing right.

So step number one is you must believe both in yourself, but in whatever it is that you’re selling, be it a process, be it to use your example, something at Rite Aid, be it whatever. You’ve gotta start with self-belief.

ADAM: You’ve gotta start with an acceptance of, you’ve gotta dispel any notion of the negativity of sales and accept what sales really is.

It’s a part of everybody’s identity.

JIM: Oh, I agree.

ADAM: It’s the reason children, now, I didn’t grow up with this, but a friend of mine did, and we were talking about it recently, his daughters, he has them doing positive self affirmations every morning. Even when he’s not present to guide them, they’re doing it. My parents didn’t do that.

I guess nobody had told them to do that. And neither did mine. I mean, that was the age we grew up.

JIM: Different parenting style. Yeah. Yeah. Had to learn that for myself as I guess you did.

ADAM: Also, that person, when they’ll come to me and they’ll say, look, I’ve an accounting business, or I’ve got this type of business and I feel really uncomfortable going out there and now presenting it, or I have a new marketing company.

I have a lot of difficulty going out there trying to sell and trying to gain clients. Their first hurdle is the one that they’ve built for themselves, and that is either they’ve adopted other people’s or they’ve got their own kind of misconceptions about what sales are. We are always selling ourselves every single thing we do.

The way you dress, the way you speak to yourself, your first client is your own mind. Never ever lie to your own mind. Never ever tell your own mind, your own client, anything bad that’s untrue. Cause your mind believes.

JIM: Believe me, I’ve been writing about this. I totally agree with you. There’s this guy, Dr. Orr, who came up with this simplified system in which he broke the mind into the thinker and the prover as he put it. So the thinker as to your affirmations can think whatever thoughts, the thinker wants to think it can think, I’m good, I’m bad. It can think I’m good at this, or I’m bad at this. Once you lock into it, the prover proves everything you believe or have told yourself.

So Tim Leary called it reality tunnels, belief systems, et cetera, and what you perceive yourself to be. That’s what you turn into. So I’m totally on your page on that one.

ADAM: That’s an interesting way, it’s a very elegant way of describing it, isn’t it? That’s really. It’s now mine. I’ve taken it . I really like that.

JIM: Well, what did Picasso say? Ordinary people borrow great artists steal .

ADAM: Yeah, mine. I really like that. It’s a very elegant way of describing it. Yeah, so the sale really for everybody has to begin within their own mind. It’s also gotta relieve the mind of its own kind of contempt for what actually happens is that a person has a lot of vulnerability.

They feel a lot of vulnerability. When they really have to sell something, they’ve gotta ask for something, gotta ask for, do you wanna buy this from me? They’ve really gotta expose themselves up to a real vulnerability, and they’re feeling it too much. They really are just genuinely feeling it too much.

Maybe they have difficulty with that feeling of vulnerability, and that’s something that they’ve also gotta get over because that’s only something that’s in their head. They’ve gotta decide what they’re really selling and what they’re ultimately selling. What everybody’s ultimately selling is themselves.

They’re selling that same way that that person in that Rite Aid, when you walk in there and they greet you with a smile, it makes you happy, genuinely makes you happier. And then when that person says, let me just walk you over there, or however they say it, cuz they’re nice little kids or nice people, they’ll say, let me walk you over there.

Here you go. Here it is. Is there anything else When they do that, it genuinely makes you feel good about yourself, makes you feel good as a human being. That person is selling themself. They’re selling themselves even to themselves. That’s their discretionary effort. They don’t have to do that. You and I and people who might be listening to this, we’re not transactional.

We sell bigger ticket things. So that’s sliver of discretionary effort of that person’s identity, that little sliver, I think they’ve underpriced it. They’ve just underpriced it. I knew as a little kid, and I established it more, I guess I’m the prover. I’m the thinker and the prover. You’re both. We all are.

That that sliver of myself, that sliver of my identity, that sliver of discretionary effort. That sliver of an extra few seconds spent with somebody means I’m gonna be losing it on the back end of something else that I would spend those few seconds on. I’m just selling my product for a heck of a lot more money.

That’s the real difference, is that person is making $8, $50 an hour or whatever it is, so that little sliver of their time and that little sliver of their emotional reserve and capacity, cuz that’s what it is. It takes effort to smile no matter what. It takes effort to smile and to be thoughtful and courteous, cuz we don’t always wanna do that.

That little sliver of that person, they sold to Rite Aid in this scenario, right? And they sold to that person for fractions of a penny. I just give myself a much higher, greater value if I’m gonna spend that 10 or 15 minutes or whatever, it’s five minutes. I’m just very aware of the cost, both to myself, how much it emotionally depletes me.

How much effort I have to put into something, how much my identity is attached to satisfaction and completion, and the professionalism of that deal. So when I close a deal, even when I’m working on a deal, I want that person to know. I want Jim to know I’m not just that other salesperson. I’m much better than that other salesperson.

Even the fact that I am gonna tell Jim ahead of time that here, when you consider signing up with us, there’s gonna be a couple of hiccups here, here, here, and here. This is how we’re gonna work past them. Have all this paperwork ready, have this ready. Just kind of a sequence. But Jim’s gonna know that I’m being candid and when I’m being candid with you in that way, you may not realize this, but I’m also exposing myself once again to without Vulner.

Things might go wrong. Now, that person at Rite Aid doesn’t have that risk. They’ve got no risk. They’re gonna buy whatever ointment they’re gonna buy and walk out, or I had to get saving fee, and they’re not holding onto any risk. The salesperson, in this case, my instance, professional salesperson, is holding onto risk.

I could mess things up. I can misrepresent the company. I could put you in a position of career jeopardy because I could persuade you to buy something. And then it makes you look foolish to your own superiors, or to your coworkers, or to your subordinates, and it exposes you to a lot of career jeopardy. So I’m aware, as a salesperson, this is step one.

We’re still in step one, that when you are buying something, I’m exposing myself, and you are also exposing yourself because you have a real jeopardy. Jim owns a company. You don’t want your employees knocking on your door saying, Hey, this thing you bought, it’s horrible. You messed up Jim. You don’t want that.

Not only does it compromise your relationships with your coworkers, it compromises your own identity to yourself. Now we’re at step one. Step one is that person, whatever they wanna sell, has to embrace that within their own identity and they’ve gotta embrace that discretionary effort. And if they can’t let go of a little piece of themselves, then that might not be the ideal product.

Even if it’s their own company, it really might not be the ideal product. If they can’t let go of a little bit of themselves, a little bit of their discretionary effort, sometimes that means you gotta be up at two o’clock in the morning. That’s what we do. That’s our identity. My identity is now a part of your identity.

And your identity is a part of my identity. Cuz you also have to know if there’s a problem. This is the person I’m gonna give a call to. I’m gonna give him a call on his cell phone and I know Adam’s gonna pick up the phone. So we’re still at step one. You asked me to begin this at step eight, which is where I’m sitting in your office.

At step eight, you are done. You’re closed. Now all we’re doing is we’re just figuring out the mechanics of onboarding and paperwork and the sequence we’re done. You may not even know we’re done. I know we’re done.

JIM: So we spent a lot of time on step one. I agree with you with everything you’ve said in terms of believing in yourself first and believing in what you’re trying to sell, acknowledging that that means you are invested a hundred percent skin in the game.

Everything I’ve ever done and succeeded at, I had a lot of skin in the game. So let’s go to step two now. Gimme step two.

ADAM: So step two is I need to know you are my prospect. I need to know, actually, let me go back to step one. No, I won’t. Okay. Well, we have . If I, the product, is this my own product or am I selling for another company?

JIM: Well, given my guess that the probability is high, that many of our listeners are working for somebody else. Let’s make it, you’re working for another company.

ADAM: Okay. Now there’s different types of different companies. There’s a startup company, and then there’s, I think the world is getting kind of de fragmented.

So we’re gonna have a lot of very big employers. So let’s take a look at the big employers. So they’ve already got kind of this repository of all the clients that have ever signed up for them again. So typically within that onboarding experience for the salesperson, when they’re coming on, they’re getting a very good feel for why clients buy what the competition is.

You have to know who the competition is, what differentiates you from the competition, and why clients will buy that product. So that’s very good. So you already have a lot of the homework done, but now it’s very essential that you sell that to yourself. It sounds crazy, isn’t it? But you’ve gotta ask Jim.

There’s gonna be a lot of gyms in my world, because I’m the salesperson. I’m gonna see a lot of gyms. When you have the opportunity, you’ve gotta ask Jim why he chose you. Why did you choose Adam to buy it from? That’s gotta actually be part of the sale. Although you’re vulnerable, you’ve gotta know for future reference.

So I know that I’m gonna have a career in this company for 10 years. I’ve gotta know now why Jim chose my company. Let’s say my company is Microsoft. Why you chose me as the salesperson, because you’ve had other Microsoft salespeople call you. So step two is really simple. From step one to step eight is actually pretty simple.

It’s just that you need to first embrace that big part of what you’re selling. And, and I always have to reiterate, you’re selling yourself. Some people will ask me, well, if you’re selling yourself, doesn’t that mean that you, you’re gonna have to compromise. And there’s a lot of sacrifice to it. Sales has a lot of sacrifice.

It really does. There’s no other way around it. It’s not a nine to five type of job. Again, that’s part of your identity. You can’t just walk away from it at seven o’clock at night. I don’t even know if anybody can build a career leaving at seven at night anymore. Stop working at seven at night. But there’s something unique about sales that you’re immediately tied to your prospect’s identity.

You really, really are. I would say that once you’re working in a company, then it depends on how you’re gonna acquire prospects. Are the prospects gonna be given to you? In which case there’s an assumption those prospects are good and your evaluation as a salesperson, I suppose, is on the close rate of those prospects that have been given to you.

There’s an assumption that they’re all kind of the Glengary’s, therefore you should be closing 20% of them. As crazy as it is, I’ve always liked to start sales my own way, even from a cold call and then building up my own kind of world of referrals. I think that that’s very helpful because I wanna train the prospects the way I wanna train them.

Does that make sense to you?

JIM: It does, yes, absolutely.

ADAM: I want that relationship to start with me explaining to them what it is, and also with me listening to what they say, cuz I’m very into listening to what they say. If I’m calling on behalf of Microsoft or whatever it is, LinkedIn or whatever the company is, there’s already kind of a brand identity.

So sometimes if you have that brand identity, you can kind of repurpose it a little bit for yourself, kind of stick yourself in front of the movie theater a little bit and kind of act as a carnival barker, which is fine because Microsoft, I actually have always liked the immediacy of cold calling. Crazy as it is.

A lot of people don’t like it. I think for everybody, it’s really, really helpful. CEOs of publicly traded companies do it in their own kind of way. They do a lot of analyst calls. They do a lot of meet and greets, and for them, They’re just replaying that story over and over and over again and listening to what the analyst calls are.

But for me, when I’m cold calling, I get to hear the way that person’s mind is working in a very few, couple of seconds as soon as they pick up the phone and I’ll ask them, hi, is is Jim? Yes it is. Hi Jim. My name is blah, blah, blah. I know that I’ve only got about 30 seconds to capture their attention if even that I’ve got about 20 seconds in which almost the rest of the relationship is gonna be built over that 20 seconds.

Isn’t that crazy?

JIM: That is crazy.

ADAM: That’s very crazy. Yeah. So it’s very important then that you can kind of very quickly say something with the anticipation that they’re gonna say, I’m not interested, or this or that, or Call me back another day. You wanna get. You don’t mind that because you really wanna find out why they’re not interested.

And that’s not to suppose that when you call them, they’re gonna say, I’m not interested. But you have to embrace it because what you’re really listening for are the verbal and non-verbal cues that will indicate where to take the conversation next. And that’s the reason I don’t like those books is because the books will tell you how to guide it.

These things are very, very fluid. I know what my destination is with that person. I know that on a cold call, like I can only get so far. I know when I pick up the phone that the optimal outcome is going to be booking a meeting. Right. Another thing, just again, I wanna repeat back. I want you to correct me if I’m wrong.

JIM: What I’m hearing you say is what some people call active listening. In other words, I’ve always tried to get better and better at that. When you’re actively listening, that’s exactly what you’re doing. You are not trying to think about what you’re gonna say next. I am listening to you, Adam, tell me Jim, how to sell.

And I give you all of my attention. And when you do that, I believe at least that’s the only way you can pick up on those cues that you just talked about. Do you agree?

ADAM: Oh yeah. I can tell, and I still can do this cuz I test this out all the time. I love this stuff. I can tell just listening to a person, by their breathing, by the sound of their voice, how much it echoes into their own throat, essentially, what they look like.

There’s so much I can tell just by listening, even when they’re not talking, when I just hear them breathing on the other side, I can even tell so much as how long it takes them for them to pick up the phone, hang up the phone, what the response is. And keep in mind there are geographical differences. So if I’m calling into South Carolina, it’s gonna be a different experience than I’m calling into New York.

After you do this for a while, you can make those regional adjustments and you need to, so this is not to say that cold calling is the most ideal because it’s not. But what it is, is it allows you to spend two or three years building up this huge, huge pipeline. And those people, by the time I’m done with Jim, Jim’s gonna know that I’ve expended so much energy and effort and my emotional identity into the sale to Jim.

And Jim is so satisfied with it that I’m also gonna be able to say, look, Jim, I make my career offer of referrals. I spend a lot of time with you, and could you refer someone? But I’m gonna tell you that at the beginning of the sale. I’m not gonna surprise you with that at the end and say, Hey, now that you signed up paperwork, gimme some referrals.

Basically, that first cold call into you, I’m already gonna tell you, if it goes past that 30 seconds, let’s say now, it’s probably gonna go to seven minutes to 11 minutes. You are gonna know. By the end of that phone call, I’m gonna have told you I’ll be spending a lot of time with you. However I wanna express it, there’s a lot of ways I wanna express it, but that I’m gonna be expending a lot of discretionary effort.

My business grows on referrals. The expectation from day one is that you are gonna give me referrals, because referrals is the best closes you can ever get because you’ve already accomplished the trust, even though you’ve never met this other person. It came from Jim’s referral, and this person trusts Jim.

Therefore, now I’m already much, much closer to the close than I would be otherwise. But now I’ve also got the additional burden, so to speak, of that I can’t mess up because if I mess up, I’m not just messing up myself in this prospect, but I’m also messing up Jim. That’s why this is all an issue of identity.

I’m now part of your life in a meaningful way, and this is also why people have to be very careful about what they choose to sell, because you’re not gonna do it passively. If you’re selling for your own company, it’s your company, then you’ve really gotta accept that emotional responsibility. And it’s even more important when you’re selling your own product that you mechanize it, which is a failure that I see in a lot of people selling their own company’s products is they’re too open for negotiation.

They lose a lot of rigidity in it sometimes to compensate for that lack of rigidity. On the next meeting, what they’ll do is they’ll just become very difficult and they’ll be like, okay, I’ll give you a call next Wednesday and I’ve sent you the paperwork last Tuesday, and they mess it up. They’re reading my books, so whatever.

JIM: So that’s interesting to me. I think that I agree with you entirely. So I’ve only worked for one company that was not a company I started, that was Bear Stearns. And the reason I could work well at Bear Stearns was because their culture allowed for a lot of what we’re talking about.

ADAM: Oh yeah. Great culture. Did you give 10% of your paycheck? Were you part of that group?

JIM: I was. I had been doing that kind of previously, so it was like fine with me.

ADAM: When you came in, did they say this is the rule, or was that just something that was understood?

JIM: It was understood. It was understood. Actually, it was one of the things that attracted me to them.

I’m a big believer in giving back as much as you can and working with people to make their lives better off what you’re talking about in sale. So the whole referral thing is really interesting to me because you’re so right. I think the advice that you’re giving is really good too, because a lot of people don’t think about it this way.

So I have to think about Adam too. If I’m gonna ask you for a favor and I probably will, I probably already have. I’ve gotta make sure that it doesn’t, in some way, compromise. So your thinking has to become broader. Your thinking has to be inclusive as opposed to excluding other people. And that itself kind of takes a certain mindset that unfortunately a lot of people don’t have.

They got imprinted early in life with a script. I call it the finger pointer. Nothing is never my fault. It’s Adam, or it’s Jamie, or it’s that son of a bitch Johnson. Remember from Forrest Gump? I’m a huge believer in you never surrender your agency. Your agency is your ability to both take credit but also take blame.

You gotta take both.

ADAM: Absolutely. So these days, most sales. So let’s take a look at, if you’re with Microsoft or something like that, it’s gonna be a complex sale. There’s gonna be a team involved. Usually it’s the salesperson who’s gonna kind of manage that team, so to speak. And maybe they’ll hand it off. And it kind of depends on instance by instance with the company.

Yet you definitely have to take ownership of that, and that’s part of the relationship. But again, I wanna get to, before I’m sitting in front of you, by the time I’m sitting in front of you, I’m telling you, Jim, I am telling you the deal is done. I don’t know if you’ve got 10 other companies you’re evaluating on your spreadsheets.

If I’m sitting in front of you, the deal is gonna be done. And you could have had seven other salespeople. They are hours before, and another three they are. But there’s a lot of things that have to be understood because at this point, I’ve already spent so much time with you and I’ve told you the questions to ask the competitors, and I haven’t told this in any way.

That gives you kind of a permission to interrogate them. But I have now turned you into my advocate to the point that you are evaluating the competition against Adam. And part of that competition is not the stuff you’re gonna find on the spreadsheet because for most gyms, the difference between this product and that product is just a bunch of jargon.

If that product is a little bit cheaper, you know what? That’s fine with me. I don’t need that extra bell and whistle also. So this bell and whistle that it doesn’t make a difference. You’re buying Adam Townsend. I’m telling you, you’re buying Adam Townsend, whether it’s Microsoft or this or that. At the end of the day, you are buying that salesperson.

Now, the fact that their company is well known or not well known is a different issue. If they’re well known, then there’s a little bit of a fail safe to it. Maybe there’s more of a chain of command and a hierarchy that I know if Adam Townsend messes up, he’s got a manager. Adam Townsend has probably also brought his manager there and is not threatened by the fact that’s saying, Hey Jim, this is my manager.

If I do anything stupid, give him a call. You feel better now, don’t you? Yeah. And I also wanna bring in my team as quickly as I can. So before I’ve sat there, you’ve already probably delegated somebody in your office asking some of the questions about how this works and how that works. Because if, if it’s a complex sale, it probably touches on a few different depart.

So I’ve also gotta soothe all those other departments, Envies and their fiefdoms and their territorial’ness and all that type of stuff. And I also understand that those departments can be obstructionists. So by the time I’m sitting in front of you, I’m actually also telling you who’s the difficult one in your organization, , right?

JIM: Right. Oh, it’s absolutely true. I know, I agree with you. I’m doing a lot of reading right now on information theory in the classical sense of the term. For example, information is what is new and surprising. So if you’re analyzing a political speech, the norm for information is zero. What does that mean? It means that a political speech, for the most part is things you’ve already heard.

So nothing surprises true information is very valuable. And as part of this research that I’m doing, one of the things that’s really fascinating to me, what you just said made me think about that. So it’s this idea that. As you go up a hierarchy, the information and feedback that the person at, let’s say this level of the hierarchy gets continues to decline.

And by this I mean when you get to the top of the hierarchy, the information you’re getting is not good. Why? Because no one wants to say anything to you that is going to upset you or whatever, et cetera. I mean, the classic was McNamara during Vietnam and the information that he was bringing to Johnson, and it was all massaged in such a way that there wasn’t real information there.

And I find this fascinating about the people at that tippy top of that hierarchy are, for the most part, certainly from within their own organization, not getting. The truth in a way, what struck that memory of what I’m reading right now was what you just said. You are gonna be able to tell me, by the way, these guys over here are really obstructionist, and guess what?

The reason that works, at least from my way of looking at it, the reason that works and why I think it’s gonna continue to work. We’re evolving, but really slowly, the reason it’s gonna continue to work is because that is incredibly valuable for the guy you’re talking to. You come in, you tell him the truth, and he’s like, whoa, what does that do?

It makes me love you. Right? It makes me, I want Adam in here all the time. They do love me. I gotta tell you, they do love me. He’s gonna tell me the truth.

ADAM: I never thought about that. I never thought about the quality of information that makes it to them, and the imperfectness of information that normally kind of procedurally makes its way them.

I never thought about that at all. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

JIM: And when you think about it and when you understand, I’m big on systems, So back in the early eighties, I keep journals too. Back in the early eighties, I was rereading one of my journals, and it was literally, I wrote 10 pages about why the Soviet Union had to collapse.

And it was because I was all into understanding the underlying system. And there it was my understanding that the underlying system was one where everybody was lying to everybody else, and the secret police had to have a secret police above them. Very meta. So in that kind of closed system, it ultimately ends up devouring itself.

Now, it can go on for a long time, but ultimately they rot from underneath. The reason why I think capitalism or free markets, let’s be clear, because capitalism has evolved in a way that isn’t always indicative of free markets. Free markets work because you or I. Can have a some crazy notion. We had Rory Sutherland as a guest and I love his book Alchemy and he had some great things and he was like, the reason free markets work is because some ners can get this idea that they’re gonna sell a tiny little can of beverage that tastes like shit and they’re gonna premium price it and they can do it.

You got Red Bull in a free world that has the rule of law, which is why I’m the way I am. And so passionately devoted to those, that’s what happens. But let’s get back to systems. What you have alighted on, which is brilliant, I think, is you have intuitively understood that information hierarchy and system.

You have also intuitively understood, at least the way I’m hearing you, that you become invaluable, to that guy. I told you, if I’m sitting there, we’re done. You’re in, you’re in, you’re done. I know as a quant when I say this, some people are like, what? What are you saying? But more fiction has been written in Excel than in Word.

That’s for sure.

ADAM: Is that a saying that you’ve heard before?

JIM: I have heard other people say it. Yeah. That’s awesome. It’s It’s not new.

ADAM: That’s mine now too. That’s mine.

JIM: Take it, take it, take it. But the whole point is you have uncovered yet another thing that is really interesting that people don’t intuitively understand, and that is that you are providing more than what you’re selling.

ADAM: Oh yeah. Yeah. That’s a good way of expressing it. Yeah.

JIM: You intuitively understand that. I think I do, but most people don’t. Most people don’t think like that. They don’t understand that. And that’s why I was excited to do this with you because when you get people starting to think differently, Again, back to belief systems and reality tunnels, as Tim Leary called them.

Literally, if you’re not tuned in, it’s the prover. If your prover isn’t tuned in to whatever, X, Y, z, literally, Adam, you can’t hear it. The famous saying, seeing is believing should actually be inverted. Believing in seeing you can’t see something unless you believe it’s. So what you’re doing, if what I’m hearing is right, and I think it is what you’re doing is you are providing so much more of a service that almost, I’m being dramatic here, but almost the product that you’re selling.

ADAM: You’re exactly true. That’s something that you can’t, but this is also why you have to sell yourself for a premium. You really do. Part of that is also kind of yourself having your own pricing discipline, not just if you’re working within. Management structure, then relying on their kind of pricing thing. Because sales commissions is also profit distribution.

So you wanna capture as much of that as you can. But yeah, what you are selling isn’t something that belongs or can be on a spreadsheet. It can’t be. It can’t be now. I never really thought about it the same way that you’ve expressed it because you’ve read all these books on it. . I’m just doing it. I’m just doing it.

JIM: You know your books, you are bleeding books.

ADAM: Yeah. But it’s just something that I’ve learned. Again, I turned this into a philosophy cuz I was so good at it, but I also have to emphasize that other people were good at it also. And just as I’ve now captured and kind of planted my flag in, uh, the thinkers and the way the provers and these other things, You’ve said it, were very clever.

I would do the same thing in a work environment because there are just certain things that you learn from people that are better than you at things. I’ve always just had a lot of intellectual curiosity, and I’ve also, when I was the underling and when I was the overlay, I’ve always been very, I think they call it manageable, and I’ve always thought of that as a very good trait because I’m always willing to kind of be introspective and, and to recognize where my deficiencies are or where I can make improvement in myself.

And that’s allowed for a lot of these corrections. So I just don’t want, when people ask me about books, I don’t want them to make corrections yet until they’ve kind of decided that they need these type of corrections because again, those listening. I’ve never read a book that could tell me about that listening skills.

Most of the books will say, if I’m sitting down in front of Jim when I present the papers to you, we’re gonna have an eye staring contest and whoever blinks first. But that’s still the belief of what people think.

JIM: Sales is so crazy. It’s so crazy. Listen, you know what’s funny about that, Adam? In my opinion, I’m usually wrong.

So I might not be right here either. But I think that all of that stuff starts with a kernel of truth. So the whole thing, I’ve studied microexpressions. That’s why when people say We’re never gonna go back to in-person bullshit. We absolutely are because there’s so much in communication that is non-verbal.

What you gotta do is pay attention to that. The old Yogi Bear I loved, sometimes you can see a lot just by watching.

ADAM: I got that one now too. I should write these down now.

JIM: I’ll send it to you, brother. Don’t worry about it, . Okay, so just in the interest of time, what I hear, and I agree with, by the way, let’s be honest with everybody who’s listening, okay?

You’re not gonna ever get even to the starting line. Honestly, if you don’t really believe that you can do it, that what you are selling, people need. That you yourself either use it or need it, or maybe if you’re selling something that we were selling something for women, you and I aren’t gonna need it, but we would hope that our lives needed it, or our daughters or whatever, or vice versa.

ADAM: I wanna make Jim’s life better, but there’s a lot of ways that we can measure making your life better. So making your life better is perhaps allowing you to live another 30 years or 40 years. Or for me, maybe it’s regaining some hair or whatever it is.

JIM: No, me too brother, but no, you look good, man.

ADAM: You, you look great. Listen, when I was 13 years old, I didn’t have as much hair as you do. But, so there’s a lot of ways that I can measure making Jim’s life better, but I’ve gotta be open to. Yes, because making Jim’s life better could be 15 more minutes that you get to spend with the kids. There’s a service that relieves you of a little bit of anxiety of some part of your business operation or whatever it is.

Making person’s life better isn’t just having grandkids. So I’m not trying to walk into a person’s business and say, I’m gonna sell you, give you some grandkids in a new house. There’s many ways that a person can quantify improvements in their life, and some of them are so small, but have such a huge premium attached to them.

That’s really what you’re trying to do. So I need to find out from Jim. So first, when I join a company, they’re gonna tell me, this is why clients sign up with us. But you don’t really believe that. You think that your company is just trying to sell, but the only way you can make that leap, now you’re in a company, the only way you can make a leap is to actually have the vulnerability to ask your clients what brings you to buying this product.

There’s a lot of different ways to express, and I don’t know how I would ask Jim of it right now, so I’m not gonna spend a few minutes kind of doing forensics on how I would ask you it. But I’ve gotta find out what value I’m delivering to Jim. There’s an assumption that I’m delivering you this value, but I want you to communicate it to me.

It’s a whole different language. I want you to take whatever way you have of expressing it, whatever words you use that are in your mind, and reveal them to me so that now that becomes part of my, I. and I take a lot of pride in it. If Jim says, Adam, you’re making my life better by this. I’m gonna say, Hey honey, you’re gonna go home, or whoever, you know, hopefully the loved one you have there.

Client told me that I made their life better in this way or in this way. You may not even tell your family at home, but it’s gonna become part of your own identity. You are now gonna think, “Adam is that person who makes this person’s life better in this way.”

And this is now part of my identity. So what before used to kind of repulse you about sales, “I don’t wanna do this, it’s uncomfortable,” now all of a sudden there’s been some kind of dislocation in your head and you take a lot of pride in it because I made Jim’s life better and I wanna make more people’s lives better.

And whether it’s an Excel spreadsheet or whatever you’re selling is to make that person’s life in some way better, not just their business.

Not just your business better because Jim, like you said, you’ve got your name on the door. So anything I can do to make your company better is making you better. You are indistinguishable from your company. You don’t go home at night and leave your company behind from your company, every single place you go.

So that is a premium product to, so that has to become a part of my own identity. So when I’m sitting in front of you, we’ve already come to an understanding of what my identity is and what your identity is. I’ve already recruited you as my advocate, and you’ve already recruited me as your advocate. Both of us are now searching your company for people who will join in our mission.

And we’re also trying to figure out where the obstructions may lie. And sometimes that obstruction is gonna lie within one of your staff members who feels threatened or this or that they’ve built their own fiefdom. Or sometimes they just feel uncomfortable with new processes and in some way it challenges them and we have to overcome that as well.

And sometimes overcoming it just means realizing, Hey, this person over there, come on, we gotta deal with this, but you and I can now communicate it in that way. I call this a lot of what I think of is a person has to seek out being the right person at the right place at the right time.

It’s something that I’ve sought out for many, many years, and I’ve also accepted when I’m not the right person at the right place at the right time, because sometimes the stars don’t align.

And I’ve seen a lot of salespeople fail who are gonna be superstars in another company. They’re better off figuring that out quickly because failure has such a devastating consequence on a person’s own identity and their own feelings of their own worth as another human being.

JIM: I agree. But I think it’s another thing that you can do to train.

So for example, I always treated failures as learning opportunities. Yeah. So I fell on my face, why’d I fall on my face? Well, maybe I did X, Y, and Z, and I can learn from that and grow from that. Maybe it’s being Irish. I don’t know. get knocked down 10 times, get up 11.

ADAM: I’m not saying don’t persevere through hard times.

That’s not at all what I’m saying. And I understand that. If I’ve already accepted that I like my profession and I like my job and I like what I’m doing, and I like the relationships I have with Jim, then I want to expend any type of effort required to make myself better at that. And I’m gonna do that because now that’s a part of my identity.

JIM: I understand what you’re saying, what you’re advocating, which I also advocate for, by the way, is it’s a buzzword in Silicon Valley and I really hate to use it, but I’m going to because it is perfect here. If you’re gonna fail, fail fast. In other words, understand, oh, this isn’t right for me.

And you know what? Probably everyone else knows that too. I’ve had many different companies and unfortunately I’ve had to have the experience of letting people go. And I’ll tell you man, the first time you do that, you are far more nervous than the person you’re letting go. Your stomach is going much worse than theirs.

ADAM: That’s, it depends. I’ve settled some grudges though. Lemme tell you.

JIM: I haven’t done that. So anyway, but one of the things that I came to learn, and it made me better when I was doing that, was they know that they know that before they’re coming into your office. I found that when I had to let people go, when I went down that path, which was, “Hey Adam, you’re a rockstar man. You’re just not right for this particular thing, but I believe you’re gonna be right and find a place that’s right for you.” It changes it from a devastating thing to hopefully getting that person, if that person already knows it, and if they’re really, if they practice honesty with self.

ADAM: There’s a mistake that people make and I just, I apologize, I interrupted you. That’s so horrible. There’s a mistake that people make all the time, and that is that they confuse what outputs really are. So they think if they’re gonna just be in the office till seven o’clock at night and the boss is gonna see them there, that that’s type of a display of real dedication and effort.

Yeah, it’s a big mistake. I want people to succeed, but I’ve also gotta accept that this might not always be the right place or the right time or something for somebody. A lot of times success in sales is surviving through attrition because there’s always kind of a cyclical nature and sometimes you just wanna be able to outperform, cuz you always have to outperform everybody no matter what.

It’s very important that you’re a superstar. There’s always gonna be kind of a cyclical nature where you’re still a superstar, but sales are slowing down, or sales are speeding up, or the pipelines have to smooth and you’re always gonna gain by outlasting your competitors within your own company. And a lot of your competitors are gonna be the people that are working till seven o’clock at night thinking that that’s the way they’re gonna achieve whatever quarter they’re gonna achieve by making that last call or doing this last thing.

They’re completely wrong about. They’re completely wrong about it. And again, I’ll say again, if I’m sitting at your desk, if I’m sitting across from you, the sale is gonna be closed. Now my trick is I just need a lot more Jims. That person who’s sitting at their desk at seven o’clock, I can tell you what their pipeline’s gonna look like.

I don’t wanna get distracted on it, but I can tell you what, their pipeline’s gonna be garbage, and they’re gonna be mistaking some type of an interaction with somebody as a prospect or a sale. And they’re also gonna be making the mistake of trying to convert just some prospect into a friend. And nowhere in the discussion we have had right now have Jim and I ever agreed that we’re friends.

Right. Have we ever said in this sales relationship that we’ve been describing, I never described us as friends, we’re not friends, but we now have established a lot of trust within us.

JIM: Yep. What you’re saying also brings the then good speed quote to mind where he’s not writing these down, man.

ADAM: Cause I mean, this is like a birthday for me.

JIM: I’m getting a lot of this . He said, don’t confuse activity with effectiveness. Yeah, when the image, when you’re talking about that guy who’s sitting at his desk at seven and making the calls and he wanting to look good to the boss, man, that is exactly the wrong way to do things. We’ve had it hammered into our heads as Americans that hard work equals success.

No, it does not. Hard work might be part of success, but too many people bought the, “if I work hard enough, I will succeed”.

No, no. You’ve gotta work smart enough. You’ve gotta understand the way things work. You don’t wanna be that guy with the FaceTime calling a list of bad names because that isn’t the way you’re gonna succeed and you’re gonna lie to your own mind.

Adam: Yes, exactly. That’s a really dangerous thing under any circumstances in sales, just as much because again, no matter what is a part of your identity, and you’re gonna lie to yourself, and that means you’re gonna also have to lie to others about the quality of what they are and your own expectations of what they are.

So what I would say is nowhere in the conversations where we discuss as though it’s a sales relationship and you’re the prospect and I’m the salesperson. We have both said, we’re not friends within this. We just have a lot of trust within us. And because you feel I’ve represented myself well, and I’ve represented my company well, I haven’t tried to supersede the authority of my company.

I’ve always kept their banner right behind my head. Sometimes I’ll put their banner a little bit ahead of me. Sometimes I’ll put a little bit behind me, but my company Marquee is always here. You’re carrying the flag. Yeah. And I’ve always set the proper expectations and we’ve become each other’s advocates.

So for that person that’s working at seven o’clock, they’re probably not gonna get it, and they’re gonna ask others for help. They’re really not interested in other people’s help. They’re interested in explaining their own failures, that they persuaded their mind. They’re just interested in something that they can tell their mind to relieve themselves of the burden.

So true. I’ve picked off of everybody. I had so many good salespeople. I really wanted to learn and to make myself better. I used to think when I was much, much younger, that I wanted to get on the phone to make Jim a friend. Now it’s the last thing I wanna do, because now I’m creating a new complexity into my pipeline.

The gym is now afraid to tell me, Hey Adam, I don’t wanna buy from you because you don’t wanna hurt your friend’s feeling. Of course, of course.

JIM: What you’re saying, you’ve repeated it a lot, and I like that because it’s repetition, right? If you want something, if you want to learn a new habit, you gotta keep repeating it, and one of the things that you keep repeating is don’t lie to yourself.

So one of my heroes is Richard Fineman, the physicist. I’ve read everything, all the books about him. You’d love him.

ADAM: Okay, what did he say? Let me hear the quote. I’m ready for the quote.

JIM: The quote is, the first rule is to not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

ADAM: So true. I have a list, and I know we’ve discussed it, our daily planners, and in my daily planner, one of them is, did I deceive myself?

Did I deceive others? Sometimes I emphasize it more because I change my daily planner for whatever behaviors I’m trying to observe and self correct. So right now, it’s really not one of them. Right now it’s about my businesses in other countries that I have to pay attention to, but. . A lot of it right now is cuz I operate on a few different time zones.

And so there’s also cultural differences and I’m trying to make sure I’m thoughtful, but that’s usually a regular part of my daily planner is about did I deceive myself? I have found that if ever I discuss money, I have to restore my own kind of awareness to myself. And I’ve just observed it now in other people as well is I guess you and I grew up at a time when people really didn’t talk about money and I think something’s happened where now it’s just a regular part of the way people communicate themselves.

And now I’ve realized in myself that it actually does a lot of damage to myself and to my own ego. I’m just trying to persuade myself of this difference that I have with other people and I lose the humanity and I’m, it’s just this horrible thing. So yeah, you can never lie to yourself, never deceive yourself, never try and misrepresent yourself.

You’re selling that to with your own mind and it’s gonna interfere. But so in sales, getting back to that love this stuff, I want everyone to be successful in it and it has to start with the mind. always, everything starts with the mind. The number one difficulty I think people have in their own businesses just start on my own company and, but I’m afraid to go out and pitch it because of everything.

They’ve been conditioned to think about sales. When that person used to call them from to get a new sprint, mobile or whatever, it’s, you know, about the difficulty they used to give that person and you know, the pleasantness that they used to treat that person with when they used to buy a car or whatever it is.

And now they’re like, Hey, now I’m that person. Essentially it’s a bit different. But now I’m that person who’s selling a car and now I’m that person who’s calling somebody to switch their phone carriers. But that’s really not accurate. It’s not accurate at all because again, that person who now has a new company and they’ve gotta sell their product before they hit the market with their product, they already have to be rigid about what the product is, how much the product is worth, but they’ve also gotta be rigid about how it’s going to improve that person’s life.

And then they’ve gotta be able to communicate that effectively with a real sense of genuineness.

JIM: Authenticity.

ADAM: Yeah, authenticity. It’s a better word cuz I was, I have a list. So genuineness was kind of difficult for me. real authenticity. And one of the problems with books is they take away that authenticity.

They really do. They take away a person’s ability to listen to the other person because now they’re just trying to get back onto a script. So now I’m not listening to you as much as I’m listening for verbal cues. So I can res go back to my script. Those books teach kind of little parlor tricks I think of them as, which is, if you say this, and I’m gonna respond this and it’s a very mechanical type of thing, but it’s really nothing that I can synthesize into my own.

Does that make sense?

JIM: Makes total sense. Uh, one of the best salespeople, if not the best at my firm I got by the name of Aria Rosenbaum, he synthesizes everything into his own identity. You can see how he processes and it’s so cool to watch because he ticks every one of your boxes. He will not pick up a phone and call a person if he does not absolutely believe what he’s gonna tell that person.

And if he does not absolutely believe that he is gonna make that person’s life a better life.

ADAM: Now that’s an interesting thing because a lot of people make a mistake that, again, it’s a matter of output. They’ll think that they’ll tell themselves, you know, I made 50 calls in a day and I didn’t get anywhere, and what’s wrong with me?

Whatever. You know, I would cold call maybe 20 times a day when I chose to, my success ratio was off the charts. But the thing is, is if a person’s doing it 50 times in a day, they’re horrible at it. They really shouldn’t about what they’re doing wrong. Kind of a performance art. Cold calling is a performance art and sales is a performance art.

JIM: Well, life is a performance art, right?

ADAM: that another quote?

JIM: No, that’s j p o s. That’s me. Alright. If somebody’s cold calling nine 50 times, either they’ve booked at least like 10 or 15 meetings or they just should not be doing it. There’s something really, really wrong because it’s very emotionally draining to do that performance.

Sure. It’s kind of like you’re getting on the Broadway stage 10 times in a two hour performance, you’re getting off and getting back on. Because when I call Jim the, there’s only so much kind of like emotional reserves for me to be able to get back on the stage and to do it because it is a little bit of a performance, my voice, the way I perform my voice so that it’s warmly greeted by your ear.

That doesn’t mean I have to sound like Barry White, but it does mean that I need you to be interested in what I say, and you’re only gonna gimme 20 seconds as soon as you pick up the phone. That meter begins 20 seconds. I’ve not 20 seconds. I’m not gonna be able to tell you all about my product in 20 seconds.

It’s impossible. So what you’re going to hear is my voice is the first thing you’re going to hear. And is it in some way an antagonistic type of voice? Is it threatening to you? Is it making certain assumptions? I have to be very careful about the way my voice sounds. I don’t need it to sound like Barry White.

I just need it to sound like it’s not challenging. I’m not trying to jump into anything with you. I’m not challenging your authority. I’m not saying is this gem, so I’ve got 20 seconds to do that. That’s a performance. It’s actually kind of emotionally draining to do that because I know that you are not initially listening to as much as what I say, but how I say it, no question.

JIM: Adam, I always learned something. When I talk with you, I wanna come back and you know what? You will come back in the meantime. Everyone can find you on Twitter. What handle there? You don’t care about it? No, I don’t care. All very good. I want everybody to be happy and that’s it. Hopefully I’ve been able to help and be a part of that and everybody be happy.

ADAM: So thank you so much for your time, Jim. It was such a pleasure. I’m so honored to be number, the first person to come back. Thank you for coming on and namaste brother. Namaste. Thank you. I appreciate it. Bye-bye. Cheers.