The Future of Sales Is No Quota with Jacco @ WinningByDesign.com - Escape Velocity Show #36
Episode Stats
Words per minute
207.71939
Harmful content
Misogyny
4
sentences flagged
Toxicity
9
sentences flagged
Hate speech
4
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode, I sit down with Winning by Design's CEO, Jaco van der Weerd, to talk about his journey into sales. Jaco talks about how he got started in sales and how he became one of the most energetic sales leaders I've ever met. He also talks about his early days as a software engineer and how that led him down a path to becoming a full-time sales leader.
Transcript
00:00:00.120
Banned is dead. Banned is essentially killing your sales.
00:00:19.220
I'm doing amazing. Thanks for coming on here and chatting.
00:00:22.020
Winning by design, sales thought leader, the most energetic.
00:00:26.600
I mean, I've seen videos of you dancing in sales.
00:00:28.680
I don't know what you're doing, but it's like meetings.
00:00:34.360
You got the unofficial title, 14 Red Bulls in four hours.
00:00:42.440
So when I go out with friends and they keep ordering beer,
00:00:46.440
then the logical is like, oh, give him a Red Bull.
00:00:55.440
I was a designated driver, and it was like seven, eight people.
00:01:02.720
You can see cars coming from like 16 miles of where you are.
00:01:08.840
Tell everybody your journey, because I know that you started
00:01:13.200
You've been doing Winning by Design for a while.
00:01:17.640
Yeah, so in the sales space, the journey is as follows.
00:01:23.580
And as an engineer, as I was traveling around the world,
00:01:44.080
I thought you were just joking when you said satellite.
00:01:49.800
No, but I'm sitting there, and I could see things on TV
00:02:04.780
That sales journey essentially learned me from early on
00:02:17.220
Most of the times people can't understand what I'm saying
00:02:23.420
But what I have is an incredible amount of passion
00:02:29.120
And I found that since I had a little bit of insight on that,
00:02:42.060
on a particular way or product technique, solution,
00:02:48.480
And I learned to see that the prospect point was important,
00:02:52.180
to not try to sell a customer, but rather to help them
00:03:02.300
Do I have to, like, you don't mind if I interrupt?
00:03:13.980
that people actually pay attention to this part.
00:03:20.480
allows somebody to be great at sales in regards
00:03:37.420
like, cause I feel like there's people that take this
00:03:41.640
And then there's some people that just kind of show up
00:03:43.380
and they get on calls and they don't really care.
00:03:55.380
Oh, it's got to be a person who's really good in talking,
00:03:59.860
and that person is going to be a great salesperson.
00:04:03.540
I believe that great salespeople and introverts
00:04:10.260
that makes them a great architect or a great engineer,
00:04:13.140
and there's 90% of people actually being able to do a job
00:04:23.060
they want to wing it in sales and when you're in that winging in the mode we often become dependent
00:04:27.700
of what we call superstars now you recognize a company that's dependent on superstars because
00:04:33.060
when something goes right first thing they want to do is hire more people in sales and when something
00:04:37.540
goes wrong first thing they do is get rid of everybody get rid of everybody right and so
00:04:41.700
when you see this is taking a place then we know this is generally a people-based organization
00:04:47.060
which in most cases would be meant as a positive but in this case you know we want to be very
00:04:50.820
careful with that we go like look not the right way now if you're an early stage startup and
00:04:55.940
you're trying to get to your first million a great sales person you know like really really make a
00:05:01.060
difference and process is not established yet so in that case you really want to move forward with
00:05:05.540
a person in that range but as soon as you reach 30 40 clients in like what we call platform sales
00:05:12.420
and let's say 20 000 subscribers if you're looking at it from a from a from a user-based
00:05:29.460
And then what you find, that sounds very theoretical,
00:05:32.160
what you find is like when people have worked in a sports
00:05:35.220
team before, not because they were the alpha, winning,
00:05:39.860
could listen to a coach, take on instructions, execute it,
00:05:43.360
improve along the way, that is what we're looking for.
00:05:46.660
And what are you, when you start working with a client,
00:05:49.280
what is the process you walk them through to make sure
00:05:52.620
that you start building those processes and kind of,
00:05:55.720
and sometimes assuming you may have to clear out
00:06:12.420
I'm not there to tell a person you can or cannot,
00:06:19.860
And then like any coach, you know, like what we do is
00:06:31.200
if you're able to make a big critic actually a proponent,
00:06:36.300
then you, you know, like they, he or she will take
00:06:39.040
a lot of persons with them along on their journey.
00:06:41.440
So often these people are critics in the beginning
00:06:45.340
And they've worked for five or six pretty bad VPs of sales
00:06:52.580
that they're pretty much reliant on their own skills.
00:06:54.640
And then this company comes by and says, here's how you do it.
00:07:12.560
And I tell the trainer, hey, I'm really using your tricks.
00:07:14.720
it really helpful great i'm now off the the list so to speak is was that allowed on this yeah you
00:07:19.220
can swear for sure okay yeah and so i'm off the list so then i'm you know then things really start
00:07:23.660
to work okay and like when you um help these companies make that transition uh is it reverse
00:07:32.300
engine like do you guys have a specific because i know you do a lot of the the videos like i mean
00:07:36.500
your diagrams i can tell you're a systems thinker and an engineer um and i want to get back to the
00:07:42.440
diagrams, but how much of it is like your process versus
00:07:49.880
OK, so we extract it first and foremost from what they do.
00:07:54.660
That's working, I'm assuming, like bright spots.
00:08:00.080
What we are knowing, like if somebody calls it,
00:08:02.460
oh, I have an investigation call, we like to say,
00:08:18.420
Now, I'm not listening to the, I'm not asking them, hey,
00:08:23.200
Let's take one of the recording techniques or software
00:08:27.900
In that call, we use that in order to analyze those calls,
00:08:33.580
We all know the most common vendors and how good they are.
00:08:52.620
Or they're saying, is I notice that you want to increase by 12%,
00:09:05.760
or is it a more specific, what do you guys call that?
00:09:07.440
We differ between rational and emotional impact.
00:09:11.400
Rational impact is what benefits the company most.
00:09:17.300
And we describe that, OK, you save the company a million
00:09:23.820
And then we say, oh, we can help you save a million dollars,
00:09:27.300
but it doesn't benefit the person on the other side
00:09:29.900
But if the person says, this is giving me a headache,
00:09:33.720
I got to create these reports, or I have to work 12-hour days.
00:09:38.900
And so then what we're saying is, OK, let me ask you
00:09:47.520
help that person, your client, solve the headache,
00:09:50.600
that person, your client, cannot go to the boss and say,
00:09:56.080
because he's really going to save me some time on the weekend.
00:10:11.880
And so what we need to do are the seller, not from us guys.
00:10:14.100
But what we need to do is like the seller is now
00:10:24.960
You've got to provide them charge, visual diagrams,
00:10:35.580
But everything in SaaS has a reasonable positive ROI.
00:10:38.340
So you've got to give a little bit more than an ROI.
00:10:46.900
got to arm your internal buyer to sell to whoever they sell.
00:10:50.160
And I feel like when I've talked to my best salespeople,
00:10:54.340
So it's almost like you've got to find their little stash
00:10:56.460
of this diagram or they paid somebody in marketing
00:10:59.700
to draw them something, and now they're using that
00:11:02.960
So for example, if somebody has a website and they have a great, let's say, blog post
00:11:10.660
or something like that, of course I can send the link of that blog post to that person.
00:11:16.560
Or what I can do, I turn it into a PDF, then I highlight in the PDF a particular section,
00:11:22.220
and then I forward to the person and say, on page two, in the third paragraph, I highlight
00:11:27.400
Now guess what they're going to do with that thing internally?
00:11:31.580
Now, I'm not interested whether everybody reads the PDF.
00:11:34.000
All I'm interested is go to paragraph two, see it,
00:11:37.300
If they're interested, they'll read the rest of the article.
00:11:44.460
to sell internally with a particular piece of content.
00:11:49.900
is if that content comes from the seller company,
00:11:55.340
to be less valuable than if that content came from-
00:12:00.080
Yeah, a Harvard Business Review article, third party,
00:12:03.400
qualified, preferably academic, but not necessarily,
00:12:39.420
We just like, boom, he said something like my mind is blown.
00:12:47.820
BANT stands for budget, authority, need, and timeline.
00:12:53.680
in case I have to sell multimillion dollar machines
00:13:29.060
Budget has an, you know, like, oh, I got 20,000.
00:13:33.620
But priority is what you can change for the client.
00:13:36.920
Now, in SaaS services, you know, like a reasonable company
00:13:40.040
will buy, let's say, five different SaaS services a quarter.
00:13:43.760
So if you're number four or five and they have budget.
00:13:54.080
And so, but that means that you need to become number one priority for that.
00:13:58.060
Who's, oh, you know what, you're going to be priority number four.
00:14:00.740
I'm sorry, we only had money for like two, you would say.
00:14:02.900
It's like, no, priority is what you can create.
00:14:07.020
And that's what you help clients arm their salespeople by the questions, by hitting the emotional.
00:14:17.000
No, the priority is set based on the impact that you create.
00:14:21.360
And that's the difference between a great sales team and another one is that if you didn't help the buyer make the decision criteria to rank it up and somebody else just gets on information selling, then they're just not going to win the deal.
00:14:33.880
Now, I'm going to give you some, you know, like, now, band is like a gating function, like other, you know, like, qualification techniques.
00:14:43.780
Well, I would say every ride is for free, but it ain't anymore, right?
00:14:54.820
Something needs to happen, not only once, but constantly.
00:14:58.600
Now, the word impact, if I hand this off as an SER to an AE,
00:15:03.900
as a sales development rep to an account executive,
00:15:10.920
Let's say the client now commits to a contract.
00:15:17.900
Now the customer success organization is going to say,
00:15:20.160
It's like, hey, may I ask, have we achieved what you wanted,
00:15:26.960
And every month, they can report on achieving the impact.
00:15:34.180
and what we call critical event is something that happens
00:15:36.780
all across the journey, and by de facto becomes
00:15:53.280
why don't you report proactively to the customer
00:15:57.840
And so one of the techniques we ask, for example,
00:16:00.020
for the onboarders, and I'll play the role, you're my buyer.
00:16:02.200
An onboarder would be like customer success or, yeah.
00:16:17.660
So what I now go is like, this is rapidly turning into like,
00:16:21.800
now what I'm going to do, you're going to be my customer
00:16:25.940
do you have an, you know, as an executive at a company
00:16:28.480
of 200 employees, may I ask, are you having a monthly meeting
00:16:37.880
And you normally spend, you know, like the days before?
00:16:41.580
Yeah, probably the previous week to get ready for it.
00:16:51.020
And so now I know it's like, and I give a graph
00:16:58.240
You just want to do a copy and paste into the document,
00:17:08.740
Like I've never heard people really break it apart this way.
00:17:24.760
that if you are able to create a life cycle around that journey,
00:17:28.340
this is the reverse bow tie I know you've talked about.
00:17:31.960
Somebody said recently, retention is a new conversion.
00:17:39.320
What other stuff do you teach people to do like that?
00:17:44.740
Because I am like, this needs to be known in the world
00:17:53.700
comes down to the simple thought of, can you take notes?
00:18:05.000
Salespeople need to learn customer success stories.
00:18:14.740
Sales is marketing, sales, and customer success.
00:18:20.060
Sometimes when I say today on the call, guys, I will try to make sure I correct myself.
00:18:27.940
And so when I see these organizations not take notes and not teaching taking notes,
00:18:33.320
if I tell you as my customer, hey, here's the five key things that are really important to me.
00:18:39.700
And then I mention one, two, three, four, and five.
00:18:41.780
And you're only going to remember two or three because you don't take.
00:18:47.020
The ones that are going to help me the most, I guess.
00:18:53.920
And so that's why taking notes is so important.
00:18:57.780
Because I know a lot of salespeople like to do,
00:18:59.480
but it sounds distracting when they're typing when you're talking to them.
00:19:03.960
I'm a fan of writing, but I'll take any taking notes at this point in time.
00:19:10.220
Yeah, I do want to make sure that when, you know, for example.
00:19:18.180
When you hear me typing, know that I'm taking notes.
00:19:21.100
Simply by saying that up front in the conversation,
00:19:37.740
But now if I told you every time you hear me type,
00:19:46.460
Like that subtle, like, hey, I hope you don't mind
00:19:52.000
So I think I've seen a blog post recently where you said
00:20:07.020
But they're going away or they're being merged.
00:20:08.720
Or do you think it's more of like one person's doing both?
00:20:11.760
Are we sure there was coffee in that cup of yours now?
00:20:18.020
What I find is that from a sales development wrap,
00:20:23.900
do along the high velocity that we originally set.
00:20:28.680
where an SDR sets up an AE that historically worked really
00:20:49.640
If you're going to distract me like I need to set up an AE,
00:20:52.760
can I have a meeting, like, that's just a great point.
00:20:56.300
On the high end, what we see is that more and more executives
00:21:03.380
you'll probably have to go through an executive of some
00:21:06.200
sorts when you get that conversation with that executive you do not necessarily as an sdr have
00:21:11.080
that knowledge on the market and on the solution you may have great sales training you may be able
00:21:16.200
to write great emails yeah you're just not known the domain you just don't and i'm not and with
00:21:21.560
many of these roles being uh performed by first second third jobbers that quite is understandable
00:21:27.320
there's nowhere no way we should blame them yeah it's just not the right process for the customer
00:21:31.800
it's a bad experience for the customer yeah and so there is a place and a room for it but we can't
00:21:36.600
blame the first and the young people in the first and the second jobbers young people in that in
00:21:42.600
those roles and say something like well they have no ability to make cold calls these days sales
00:21:47.160
people these days are blah blah blah i'm not believing in that you know what sales people are
00:21:50.680
they're not trained we all the time compare this to sports and army look folks if you really want
00:22:06.400
And so I go like, look, I am literally working.
00:22:09.340
I'm playing a game, three games in the morning,
00:22:12.520
And if I can, one game later that night, right?
00:22:16.100
So we can't really compare it to sports this way.
00:22:21.620
at these world-class sales orgs that are process-focused
00:22:26.660
it's not about the star players, what's their rhythms for cadence for meetings, and what
00:22:33.140
If I focus that on training and performance improvement rather than...
00:22:36.320
Yes, like coaching, listening to calls, review, call reviews.
00:22:39.220
The trick is that it's not necessarily meeting-driven.
00:22:49.000
Let's say that you and I are playing basketball, and we're two and two on against each other.
00:22:52.280
And I notice that the Dutski on my side is constantly blocking me.
1.00
00:23:03.620
We'll watch the game tape and then we'll figure out what's going on because this sucks.
0.69
00:23:07.460
Oh, yo, why don't we wait until the end of the quarter?
0.83
00:23:10.040
And then if you haven't won yet, you'll fire me or something like that.
00:23:15.660
The second thing is we need to pool our resources.
00:23:19.460
So instead, if I have four people making, let's say, outbound calls or emails or discovery calls,
00:23:24.960
who are all learning at their own pace at their own time by the time i vetted if something works
00:23:30.160
or doesn't work four people have to go through the process if i say hey folks uh marianne can
1.00
00:23:35.660
you start on the focus can you can you work on give me over the next week can we figure out what
00:23:39.980
really works as a great opening and during discovery call can you do this and person why
00:23:44.420
can you focus on the demo and then we have best practices we're actually starting to work together
00:23:49.120
as a team there's a reason why this is not happening why is that it's called individual
00:23:54.800
contributor the history of sales has been individual contribute individual contributor
00:24:00.240
yeah i remember you know people didn't share didn't share no because they don't want you to
00:24:05.440
beat my commit like i want to win i don't want you to knock on the same doors that i do and have a
00:24:09.520
better pitch than i have making more money on these real estate sales and so on and so forth
00:24:26.840
And we go like, well, why don't you go in that corner?
00:24:28.640
Yeah, you go to that corner, and then we'll see who performs.
00:24:34.560
between your approach and other sales training?
00:24:38.120
I think our biggest approach is that we're looking at it
00:24:41.820
we are willing to forego any existing you know like open door and go like no no no that's not
00:24:46.940
the case yeah let's try something different yeah let's try something different it ain't working
00:24:50.860
um we call it work smarter instead of harder um i do not know exactly your birth year give
00:24:56.780
or take 79 79 i'm 70. i was raised then in a world that my parents thought that everything
00:25:05.900
could be solved by working harder i'm as blue collar as blue collar can be my dad i mean like
00:25:10.220
like it's hard work i went to boxing my coach thought everything could be solved by doing more
00:25:15.580
push-ups more sit-ups and so on right then i went i went to chess actually before that and it was
00:25:20.460
like play more games become more better better time playing time playing now essentially you know
00:25:26.220
humble i was not humble bragging coming what a break bragging becoming no humble break
00:25:38.740
he, in a period of 18 months, was able to get me
00:25:48.760
In running, running more miles won't make you faster.
00:25:59.780
We went and started running a hill and was like, that sucks.
0.98
00:26:04.560
And so you're taught that you need to work smarter, not harder.
00:26:11.740
from the very reason that they come out of school
00:26:17.900
It's not like study more, know where to find the information.
00:26:21.560
My daughter was telling me the other day, she's 14-year-old,
00:26:23.940
that they actually are given the test results already
00:26:30.300
it's knowing do you do you know how to get there and so what we see today is that we have the
00:26:36.420
problem for the time being that two generations are biting each other most managers most not all
00:26:43.180
of them are people that were raised in the world of working harder their mindset make more phone
00:26:48.580
calls write more emails have more discovery calls win more business and then we have them teaching
00:26:53.580
that to a generation who was were was taught on working smarter and those two cultures are biting
1.00
00:26:58.260
each other and there's a movie called buck there's a movie called buck there's a you know like a
00:27:02.820
horse whisperer and they ask the horse whisperer you know like what is the problem with you know
00:27:07.220
like you and you know like why are you able to do this to do this and he says because i realize
00:27:13.620
that most of the time or you know when when owners of horses come in they bring me in
00:27:18.260
because they say they have a problem with the horse after a while i realize it's not the horse
00:27:23.620
who's the problem it's the owner and so he says most of the time it's the owner doesn't take care
00:27:28.020
of the horse properly doesn't feed and so on same here with the younger organizations most of the
00:27:33.620
time it ain't the people who are the problem it's the lack of processes that the organization was
00:27:38.740
willing to implement that's the cause of the disruption on that token um you know i recently
00:27:45.540
heard that i think it was steward at slack saster he said um you know at a their lower smb type
00:27:51.300
sales people they're not quota carrying members are you seeing this as a trend absolutely because
00:27:56.500
like if it's process and it's training sounds like customer support sounds like engineering like i
00:28:02.500
will only drop one f-bomb okay you drop it absolutely i look if everybody was so motivated
00:28:10.180
by money shouldn't we hit more quota all over the place because we're so motivated by money
00:28:15.380
okay so that's one second thing is do you ever see on instagram people bragging about
00:28:20.900
how big their bank account is rolling his tax of money right you don't 20 years ago vince murdica
00:28:26.980
closed a massive deal for me at that point in time i would now be working for him by the way but you
00:28:31.220
know like vince closed a massive deal with disney he cashed a check bought one of the first laxus
00:28:37.700
school car we all went to the parking lot and we celebrated vince look at the pre you know we took
00:28:42.420
rise in the lexus it was a celebration the demonstration of you being wealthy because of
00:29:02.920
So we know that this whole thing is falling on its sword.
00:29:06.180
The second thing that I know, if I'm going to hire you.
00:29:19.180
Like, if you are young in your first, second, third job,
00:29:22.280
which what we've seen is, we've seen that SaaS,
00:29:25.080
because of the way it's priced, can no longer afford
00:29:30.460
cannot afford a $250,000 to $500,000 enterprise account
00:29:40.280
to the age bracket 25, 30 as the form of the senior executive.
00:29:46.760
don't have mortgages, and all these debt are hanging over them.
00:29:49.580
Do you remember the term, hire a salesperson who
00:30:01.820
They would sell anything to anyone to get the debt paid off.
00:30:09.140
They'd be over-promising, over, yeah, selling the moon.
00:30:16.940
professional services, and then you get all these.
00:30:18.980
Oh, this is going to be your customer success nightmare,
00:30:22.520
And so what we see is that all those things have changed.
00:30:28.040
That doesn't mean that that's all of the fundamentals.
00:30:33.680
Younger people, first, second jobbers, want a career.
0.75
00:30:38.340
They want to learn about the market that they're selling
00:30:40.420
They want to learn about becoming a manager, an executive.
00:30:47.860
Coach them on what they need to have a broader.
00:30:53.800
Adobe is a great place to go to have an academy for that,
00:30:59.840
It is no surprise if you see at the con ongoing success
00:31:06.760
And I think that in the future, and when I mean in the future,
00:31:10.220
I hope next year, but let's say three to four years,
00:31:15.640
will ultimately use it as a competitive differentiator
00:31:21.200
And it'll be more process-driven, less star-driven,
00:31:25.720
And they're not really looking to line their pockets
00:31:35.800
It's almost like a validation feedback loop of,
00:31:39.940
Because if people are buying because I've helped them
00:31:41.960
the right decision i feel confident that this academy is teaching me stuff look now let me
00:31:47.000
tell you let's go into some hot water let's go into stuff yeah okay so in this process marketing
00:31:55.000
sales on board as customer success account manager who gets who generally gets paid the most money
00:31:59.960
sales sales okay now is there a reason why yeah i mean okay i'm following you on this okay now i've
00:32:07.080
i came into this job as an engineer as i said to you now and as an engineer i had 11 years of
00:32:11.320
education on my particular field of expertise and as i you know started deploying that i noticed
00:32:16.360
when i became into sales that suddenly i made a lot more money without having any credentials i'm
00:32:21.080
going like well why is that why and at that point in time it was taught to me what what is the
00:32:27.080
distance to the river is money is like a river that flows to the company the further you are
00:32:32.840
away from that river the less you make sales people are pretty close to the river of money
00:32:39.880
And therefore, when they take a bucket out of money,
00:32:43.960
Sometimes 2x to 3x of what other people in equally productive
00:32:54.860
and come up with some thought about how much money I make.
00:33:06.140
So today, the revenue and recurring revenue stream
00:33:27.320
Would it happen, would it have to do anything to do with,
00:33:34.940
what is it why is it that the people i said that the other day in a company this was people taking
00:33:41.020
care of the customer people taking care of the customer responsibility for the revenue
00:33:44.620
nine million dollars in recurring revenue stream average pay 110 000 okay salesperson winning
00:33:51.020
deals average pay 180 000 revenue that they generate per year five six hundred at most right
00:33:57.740
yeah and i go like well but they're generating it and therefore i'm like dude a customer success
00:34:02.460
person with a great experience can create more leads than just a salesperson referrals and so
00:34:07.820
on so i am up for that debate different skills as i get it here's what i'm not talking about
00:34:13.740
i'm not saying we should pay one more or less i just say pay them equal everybody has an equal
00:34:20.140
role to play but to start singling out and then putting people on president's clubs as if they're
00:34:25.420
like you know like there's one special i'm like no don't you think that everybody was involved
00:34:30.300
in closing this deal you'd really thought that that one person was magic so it's also a byproduct of
00:34:34.620
just the way software or sas is bought because it is you know it's the back end it's like the
00:34:39.420
upfront yeah you get the customer but if we can service account if we can upsell if we can cross
00:34:43.260
sell that's where the real um revenue is going to come from so it's the models change the culture is
00:34:49.100
changing the the sales process is more process driven than star driven these are big ideas
00:34:56.380
and these in generally are becoming rightly available right now because data becomes available
00:35:00.540
so now i can see not only see which salesperson has a better conversion rate or shorter sales
00:35:06.220
cycle if i have a shorter sales sales cycle and i have a really good conversion rate we may say
00:35:11.020
oh that person we should not fire however if i now connect that to the churn matrix retention yeah
00:35:16.300
i go like oh my gosh actually that was not good and that other person they had a short cycle
00:35:20.700
because they were selling the moon and then bingo they're turning after six months when they didn't
00:35:24.860
deliver and so now i can see that jennifer who was taking a little bit more time educating the
1.00
00:35:28.940
customer was a little bit more thoughtful on us that the customer may have had like like 20
00:35:33.660
longer seal cycle but oh my gosh not only sticking five six seven x more exactly and we know that
00:35:39.980
the compound impact of that in the future can be even bigger and as we are extending our metrics
00:35:45.420
into the future built the trust of the customer trust the customer that's huge yeah um jaco you've
00:35:53.260
and obviously contributing to the knowledge in the sales
00:36:03.560
needed to become to run the organization that you run today
00:36:09.540
What are some of the areas that you look inwardly
00:36:14.920
Yeah, so for me, I didn't start to become a CEO of a company.
00:36:20.380
And so right now we're, you know, like anywhere between 50 and 70 people.
00:36:24.420
And so, you know, like I find that, you know, like it is what you need to do as a leader of a company.
00:36:32.340
You need to remember what is what your true core is.
00:36:43.480
I could load up this Red Bull can with water and say, like, well, I shouldn't drink Red Bull.
00:36:48.260
and I'm starting drinking Red Bull because I'm on brand.
00:37:17.880
just because i brought it up one of our team members is very involved with creating a culture
00:37:24.840
where women are equally in executive position and so on we've never spoken about that in any
00:37:32.520
conference we have well over 50 i think 54 55 of our organization is is female yeah now if i go
00:37:42.040
about that and make this the point of this particular podcast it doesn't serve anyone i i feel
00:37:47.720
like i'm using it to promote oh my god yeah we care about this we care about this if you care
00:37:54.200
about it then do something about it if you don't care about it don't say anything about you know
00:37:57.800
like and like i i feel very strongly about it like i said this is the only exception look up
00:38:03.880
on all my podcasts we never talk about how we are ourselves diverse if somebody needs to go
00:38:08.680
up and speak about it how diverse you are do something about it i really believe in doing
00:38:13.400
something about it way more than talking about it yeah and what you're saying is that for you you
00:38:18.840
believe the more you've leaned into just honoring who you are versus trying to be something because
00:38:24.840
it's going to help you in a certain way it just doesn't work we just want to have the best people
00:38:29.160
work for our company i don't care a hood about where they come from or anything else yeah like
00:38:34.760
any form of culture yeah i don't you know like you know what i care about you know what i find more
00:38:40.120
i like working with kind people i like working with people if there's a conflict they say oh
00:38:45.080
let's figure this out together i like work you know like i you know like do i discriminate on
00:38:49.640
kindness i'm more less and less like people you know like when there's a conflict dropping an f-bomb
00:38:56.280
i'm okay every now and then it's part of being a human being it's an emotion but you know like you
00:39:02.040
Sometimes these people are like, I'm like, no, no, I don't.
00:39:06.980
Kindness to me is something that is becoming really,
00:39:09.700
really meaningful in order to build a productive company.
00:39:18.000
Because I know you just dropped a bunch of books.
00:39:26.480
But, you know, like we launch about a book every like 60,
00:39:29.280
Yeah, like I remember I just bought like three of them.
00:39:31.700
I feel like there was a whole selling by designer.
00:39:35.240
We have seven books, but they've been published over the years.
00:39:41.220
is really has come with some friction inside the company,
00:39:45.480
is we started to publish core principles of sales
00:39:50.340
that we previously would sell at the premium price.
00:40:05.940
I believe that when a company like an Adobe is one
00:40:08.740
of our customers, they're not going to go like, you know what?
00:40:22.400
They buy us for the help that comes associated with it.
00:40:27.240
together and so on so we published all the content on youtube we published the books on amazon and
00:40:34.460
then we published all the designs on lucid chart and i believe that anybody who's willing to go
00:40:40.220
through the depth of putting them together themselves like a kid you earned it there's
00:40:44.820
no need for me to go charge you a couple of hundred dollars for a training session so go do it
00:40:49.840
yeah it's all there make it there and i really believe that moving forward we i hope that at
00:40:55.240
one point in time that that you know like that there's enough today it is super me and i'm not
00:41:01.460
saying that because i'm on the broadcast you can see sometimes the tears in my eye it's really
00:41:05.020
meaningful to me when somebody comes to me says like hey you really helped me with this this and
00:41:09.120
this and look at the designs i'm creating like dude that's real stuff you help the person and
00:41:14.860
you know like and this is the reason you know like i said it's uh to dan early on who's you see a lot
00:41:19.560
of these videos is that look remember those videos will be seen by your grandchildren don't forget
00:41:27.480
what it says about you when you shoot them be honest be sincere be upfront and stuff like that
00:41:33.120
look it's really known that there's a few people in our industry who drop a lot of f-bombs
00:41:37.800
okay i want to know how that translates to 20 years from now when my great-grandchildren see
00:41:42.200
that yeah how are they going to feel i'm not against a single f-bomb with an emotion that
00:41:45.980
points to a particular point in the conversation yeah they're used i just cannot deal with their
00:41:52.300
thoughts that i'm teaching other people to also start dropping f-bombs in order to also think that
00:41:56.800
that is normal i like look the world is a tough place these days i'm a speaker and i have an
00:42:01.880
audience you have followers on podcast we can make this world a better place by doing a better thing
00:42:07.400
being more kind and being kind to each other is a form of the language that we use and in this
00:42:12.080
process i want to educate them about sales and sharing the passion dan this is the one of the
00:42:17.440
most beautiful jobs that we have in the world yeah and it's accessible to anyone universal degree
00:42:24.620
optional introverts everybody everyone but i'm not gonna you know i do not like if it's always
00:42:31.280
everybody closing twist their arm make something happen it's some secret wushu move or something
00:42:35.340
like that yeah look learn how to communicate with another human being ask good questions ask good
00:42:39.600
questions be kind if they have an issue for customer success be empathetic go the extra mile
00:42:44.880
because it's not crowded go the extra mile because it's not crowded i don't mind working hard it's a
00:42:49.520
skill that i have i think that it still matters but i'm equally convincible that working smart
00:42:55.200
could provide an equal benefit that's awesome youtube appreciate you man thanks so much thanks
00:43:00.080
for watching this episode of escape velocity be sure to like and subscribe and leave a comment
00:43:05.840
with your biggest insight from our conversation.