00:01:00.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:08.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:53.000But look, I'm going to tell you something that no one else is going to tell you is that Mike Lindell loves America and that millions and millions of people want to help Mike Lindell.
00:02:03.000I know I get emails from people all the time, thousands of people.
00:02:06.000They say, how can we help Mike Lindell?
00:03:02.000Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:03:04.000I am thrilled to have with us today a friend of mine, someone who I've learned a lot from, and someone who has a very exciting new book out, Jim Holden.
00:03:12.000He has a new book called Selling in an Anxious World.
00:03:36.000And incidentally, I would also like to thank you for your contribution to our new book, Selling in an Anxious World.
00:03:44.000What you did with the chapter that you wrote was great, illuminating culture, war, and the universities and how that could impact corporations with a younger generation coming into the workforce.
00:04:11.000So, Jim, why don't you just kick it off and tell us why you wrote this book and just walk us through the big ideas and then we can go from there.
00:04:21.000Well, Charlie, it goes back a couple of years, actually, when we as an organization began to observe that sales effectiveness was in decline.
00:04:30.000And it wasn't clear why, what was happening, what was damaging sales.
00:04:34.000So even with large companies, industry leaders, we're observing that they just were not growing organically.
00:04:43.000And so we began to focus intensely and trying to figure out what was going on, what was happening.
00:04:49.000Now, at the same time, part of our business is consulting and working with companies on very large, important pursuits where we provide guidance and direction.
00:04:58.000It was there that we began to see what was essentially invisible, that the problem was all about culture conflict.
00:05:05.000That is the conflict between the supplier's culture, the norms, the values that influence behavior, and that set expectations for how you get things done in the organization, conflict between that culture and what salespeople in the field had to do to be successful in servicing clients, winning business, that type of thing.
00:05:26.000So we started to focus on that and very, very quickly realized that the problem is that culture is not visible.
00:05:36.000And so we decided, well, we're going to bring some structure here.
00:05:40.000We began to work to categorize culture to create three types of culture, to identify three types of culture.
00:05:49.000One that's good, one that's bad, and one that's a mixed deal.
00:05:53.000Now, as we began to do that, we took a quantitative approach, if you will, very objective to being able to go in and assess culture.
00:06:03.000We found that with some customer organizations, the culture was very positive.
00:06:08.000And we termed that a client-centric culture, where the company really cares about clients and client experience, where they listen to the customer, where they bring thought leadership to the customer, really focusing on delivering value and at the same time, differentiating from the competition.
00:06:28.000But when you talk to CEOs or corporate executives, they all tell you that, hey, customers are very important, customer satisfaction is very important.
00:06:40.000But even in the book, we talk about a study where 80% of CEOs who were surveyed said they provide a superlative customer experience.
00:06:52.000But yet, when they talk to their customers, only 8% agreed with that.
00:06:56.000So there's a huge gap between what executives think is happening, but on the ground is actually not happening.
00:07:03.000And that creates the opportunity for a bad culture, what we call looking glass culture.
00:07:08.000Now, looking glass culture is one where it's like looking in a mirror because you're not focused on the customer and what's good for them.
00:07:17.000This is a situation where the supplier really doesn't care about the customer, doesn't care about bringing thought leadership, doesn't care about making sure they make a contribution to their business.
00:07:32.000Instead, the focus is on themselves and what they do.
00:07:37.000And what happens there is that it puts the salesperson in a situation of conflict because either he does what's right for the customer and he alienates himself from the culture and the people that are part of that culture, or He goes along with the culture thinking and rationalizing that, hey, you know, customers will come and go, but I have to live with these people and I don't want my career to be damaged.
00:08:28.000The problem with this looking glass culture that's so internally focused is that it damages sales in a way that's very, very difficult to fix because the company tends to go into, like people, a denial phase.
00:08:49.000So when an opportunity is lost, they rationalize and say, well, you know what?
00:08:54.000This customer wasn't very intelligent anyways.
00:09:22.000Now, after depersonalizing the customer, they depersonalize their own people and they blame the salespeople and they start firing salespeople.
00:09:32.000We were brought into one situation with a major company, Fortune 100 company, that had fired all of its salespeople in North America.
00:09:39.000The average tenure when we came in was a year and a half in a business where it takes 18 months just to get up to speed.
00:09:48.000So, you know, with this kind of thing happening, this type of culture is very destructive.
00:09:54.000And Charlie, it's not just about sales.
00:09:57.000It's also important to customers that when they want to work with a company where they want to partner with a company, because when they're working with a client-centric supplier, it's a real partnership that starts with them, goes through sales all the way to RD, because RD then produces innovation that customers can really use.
00:12:15.000And I will tell you, I tell you the truth, one of the most significant things they can do as they look at joining a company is to assess its culture.
00:12:26.000As the China virus spreads across the globe in the spring of 2020, Noble Gold's investors flocked to a precious metal as a financial safeguard.
00:12:34.000Gold is up more than 30% since March of 2020.
00:12:37.000Silver has surged more than 50% over the same period, reflecting the correlation among precious metals during times of financial volatility.
00:12:44.000But providing financial protection is not the only role that precious metals play in the fight.
00:12:50.000Precious metals also have broad applications in the medical field that go well beyond the dental uses most people associate with their value.
00:12:57.000But providing financial protection is not the only role that precious metals play in this fight.
00:13:01.000Gold and silver nanoparticles are an essential part of the virus research and prevention.
00:13:05.000As the Chinese coronavirus continues to mutate, science will have to adapt its prevention methods accordingly, and precious metals continue to stay in demand.
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00:13:26.000Call NobleGold today and tell them Charlie Kirk sent you for a special gift with all qualifying transfers.
00:13:34.000What should the young people look for?
00:13:38.000When they go in, they're going to go through a structured recruiting process.
00:13:42.000What they should do is take the criteria that we have in the early part of the book, ring up one or two salespeople, county executives, and just say, hey, I'm Jim Paul.
00:14:32.000You know, you can, and this is so important because the trajectory of a young person's career will be set by that first company or two that they join.
00:14:44.000If they join a good company, they will accelerate their career, reduce their time to success by at least five or more years.
00:14:53.000So if you just go beyond the recruiting process and take an unconventional, a non-traditional approach of understanding what is the real personality of the company I'm joining.
00:15:05.000And it's not just about career success, Charlie.
00:15:08.000It's about having some fulfillment, joy.
00:15:11.000I would say to every young person who may be listening or watching this podcast, you are probably associated in some way with Turning Point USA, right?
00:16:40.000This is chapter five in your book that I want to repeat the title, Selling in an Anxious World.
00:16:46.000Yeah, by all means, it is very, very critical whenever you're dealing with an organization that you separate influence from authority because they're not the same thing.
00:16:57.000You can have high-level people in a company who have a lot of authority, but very little influence, maybe close to retirement, or have no interest in what you're doing.
00:17:05.000Conversely, there can be a lower-level person who has influence disproportionate to his or her authority.
00:17:12.000These people can exert influence across departmental lines, but it's like culture.
00:17:39.000A fox is a brilliant, high-integrity individual, rarely surprised by events, can work in exceptional policy.
00:17:47.000And this person is the individual you want to align with.
00:17:51.000When you're in a recruiting process, you're looking at joining a company.
00:17:57.000The first thing you look at is, is it a culture I want to be in?
00:18:00.000The second is, who am I going to work for?
00:18:03.000Is this guy I'm going to work for in the power base or out of it?
00:18:06.000Because if it's out of it, your career success is going to be dialed down dramatically.
00:18:13.000In a corporation, your success from a career point of view is a function of not just providing value, but having that value recognized by powerful people who can promote you.
00:18:26.000So if you go in and you work for a department and that department is out of the power base, you've just screwed yourself without knowing it.
00:18:35.000In sales, it's imperative, you know, particularly on large ticket sales, big stakes, strategically or dollar-wise or Euro-wise.
00:18:45.000You go in, it's imperative that you go beyond the decision-making people, the people formally involved in the procurement, and get to people in the power base who can create budget, who can give you a non-traditional source of competitive advantage to defeat competitors.
00:19:04.000So the two areas that I feel strongly about for young people today, and by the way, this was a motivation in writing this book, was to help people.
00:19:12.000And I know even on a podcast like this with an author, you think, well, okay, the intent is to sell books.
00:19:34.000And we talk about how college campuses are really not serving the best interest of its graduates and what it could possibly, what it could impact when it actually goes beyond the campuses.
00:19:51.000You say, quote, when people become preoccupied with their company culture due to the perceived career risk, they're not only in the culture, but of it.
00:19:59.000With a diminished ability to see what's really happening, the irrational becomes rational and sales decline.
00:20:07.000And, you know, this book is pretty non-traditional and it uses a lot of metaphors and analogies to try and make the invisible visible by looking at it in different ways.
00:21:12.000Chapter eight, you say putting a face on culture.
00:21:15.000In chapter eight, you're introduced to the concept of personifying culture to better understand how it actually works, what drives it, what threatens it, and how it protects yourself.
00:21:24.000Can you talk about this on actually putting a face to culture?
00:21:29.000Yeah, it's, you know, when you think about culture, it's this very abstract thing.
00:21:36.000And the academics talk about it in ways that can be very esoteric.
00:21:46.000But culture is something that you can view as an entity that's living and breathing, that has intelligence, it has sustainability, it has tenacity, it has influence.
00:22:01.000And so when I go up against any kind of adversarial situation, I tend to personify it.
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00:24:45.000So maybe you have some form of a website and you're like, how do I drive business?
00:25:13.000When it comes to really large opportunities, and so in the U.S., they could be 100 million plus or even with government procurements over a billion USD.
00:25:28.000And the tendency is for the team to not be configured correctly because so many people want to get involved with this major pursuit because it can be career advancing.
00:25:38.000So it attracts people like moss to a light.
00:25:42.000But what it also does is it creates great visibility for the lead sales executive and the sales team, the core team that have to make this successful.
00:25:52.000Because everybody will be second guessing.
00:25:54.000Everybody will be watching what that team's doing.
00:25:57.000And this is where you run into the most significant cultural conflict on big deals.
00:26:04.000Now, when that happens, a senior executive can tell the team lead to do X when the team lead knows that's a disaster and he really needs to do Y.
00:26:16.000And at that point, the team lead has to make a decision.
00:26:20.000Do I protect my career and do what the executive wants or do I risk losing a $100 million deal?
00:26:27.000That conflict, we have a phrase for that.
00:27:21.000And this is what happens when somebody tries to operate counterculturally to make sure we win the deal, going up against the senior executive.
00:27:30.000The other people, his colleagues, her friends, will actually come in and stop him or try to stop him from doing it.
00:27:39.000Just like what happens with the monkeys.
00:27:42.000So we developed an approach for solving the monkey dance problem.
00:27:47.000And it involves having an executive sponsor for the account and how that individual can work in the white space to keep you from never getting into the monkey dance because it's tough to get out once you're in it.
00:27:59.000And so how you configure your team, how you configure it and how your pursuit team operates is key to not only getting the business, but protecting you against the monkey dance.
00:28:13.000So chapter three or the third section of the book is all about that.
00:28:17.000And by the way, just to come back to our young folks again for a moment, if they really want to fast track their careers, not only should they go and talk to salespeople in order to determine what culture they're going to walk into, but also to examine whether or not they might like to get into sales, because it's one of the fastest tracks to advancement, particularly if they're with a great company in big ticket selling.
00:28:51.000It's the ability to be able to convince people to not just buy your product, but align with you and connect with you.
00:29:00.000Can you talk about how the word sales is a filler word for actually something that's more comprehensive in the economy?
00:29:08.000Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right.
00:29:10.000And people do tend to view sales superficially because there are a lot of salespeople working in looking glass cultures and it's all about them.
00:29:21.000Management is pushing them to close the deal this quarter, even if it's not in the best interest of the customer to do so.
00:29:27.000Even if it's going to damage relationships.
00:29:30.000But sales is very much based upon caring and trust.
00:29:35.000When you care about your customers, you will take the time to learn their business.
00:29:39.000When you learn their business, you can bring thought leadership.
00:29:43.000You can guide them not only to provide value, but to go beyond that and provide unexpected value.
00:29:49.000And when you give them value that's unexpected, same thing when you're working for a company.
00:29:54.000When you not only do what the boss expects you to do, but you go beyond that and create a value he didn't know was possible, it does wonders for your career.
00:30:04.000Well, the same thing is true with sales.
00:30:07.000Selling today is really a lot more consultative.
00:30:11.000But if I had to use one word, it's about caring, caring for the customer, caring for your own company in a way that's balanced and building trust-based relationships where not only the customer trusts you, but also people in your own company that can provide you resources to better serve the customer.
00:30:40.000And the last part of the book, you say, imagine that you're climbing a mountain that symbolizes the relationship with your customer or the person that you have to persuade.
00:30:48.000You qualified the mountain in that condition.
00:30:51.000Conditions are good for the ascent from the base camp, but just as you would qualify an important opportunity.
00:30:57.000But unlike selling, if you make a mistake, you could die.
00:30:59.000This last part of the book deals with emotions that define and influence all of us when confronted with real challenges.
00:31:35.000And as a result, often your competition can be no decision because they just perceive risk.
00:31:42.000It could be career risk, risk for the company.
00:31:44.000When you get onto a mountain, it's all about managing risk because there's going to be physical endurance required and emotional, psychological endurance required as well.
00:31:56.000And you need on a mountain to have really good situational awareness.
00:32:00.000If the freeze point's going up and avalanche conditions are going to set in, you need to be able to move quickly, decisively.
00:32:08.000Everybody on your team has to move as a group, as a unit, and they have to trust you as the team leader.
00:32:15.000There are a lot of analogies between mountaineering and sales because on big deals, people put their careers at risk.
00:32:22.000Now, admittedly, it's commercial risk and not life-threatening.
00:32:29.000But if I could, when I recruit people, if I could take them on the upper part of a mountain, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
00:32:37.000Whoever you think you are, strong, arrogant, smart, whatever, the real you becomes visible to everybody when you're on the steep part of a mountain making an ascent at high altitude, especially if you're up 18,000, 19,000 feet.
00:32:52.000And even to you, you'll see who you really are.
00:33:28.000We have the ability, we have the tools, having classified culture in the way we've done it for companies, for senior executives to really see what the culture of their organization is to maximize productivity.
00:33:40.000For people joining companies to see really what the personality of the company is and do I sit there?
00:33:47.000Will it match what I believe is important values?
00:33:50.000I also think that from a customer perspective, they will never be able to partner with a company that operates with a looking glass culture.
00:34:02.000For young people joining companies, if they go into a looking glass culture, they're going to damage their career before it's even started.
00:34:10.000So, you know, if there's one point I would make, it's make the invisible visible.
00:34:19.000Most people in the world discount the intangible.
00:34:23.000They always default to what they can feel, see, hear.
00:34:29.000But that's not where the opportunity is.
00:34:31.000The opportunity is not only to see what other people haven't seen, but to be able to think differently about that which everybody sees and build competitive advantage if you're in sales, build career acceleration if you're joining a company.
00:34:47.000And if you're a leadership, view culture as an executive as something that needs to be accretive to your shareholders as well as to your employees and your customers.