104: Josh Braun Founder of Sales DNA

hey john how's it going buddy good man how you doing good buddy good buddy thanks for having me on yeah thanks for coming on man because it's what the world needs is yet another podcast episode we don't have a man we don't have enough sales uh podcasts so we need one more we don't right so uh hey everybody's got their own flavor to it so why not that's right uh so what have you been up to these days not much man i don't know if you remember me uh i do after looking at it done it you know because jelly vision it was jelly vision right yeah yeah yeah you got a good memory yeah um i i was trying to rack my brain and then i'm like all right yep and that was an interesting uh that was an interesting engagement i fucked up but that was actually a story on that one that's right that's right uh with with how i fucked that one up hard like i because i because i remember it was it was your ceo or something that was on that's right that's right completely fucking i tell this story once a year maybe we can actually have this conversation during during the podcast but i i tell everybody you know because i go back to back to back to back to back meetings right so it's always like next to next next next next sometimes i just get fucking lazy and i and i don't usually i go through my prep the night before i go through my checklist of what the company does and all this stuff and kind of come up with my logical thoughtful questions and all that other shit and but sometimes i'm just like fuck it you know what it's the same goddamn conversations i go through the motions right and inevitably when that happens when i get lazy inevitably what happened during jelly vision happened to me whereas i kind of go through the motions i do my thing i tell my little pitch and all that other stuff and then midway through somebody's like so could you tell us what you know about us or could you like hey john by the way i'm a ceo and i haven't fucked you haven't asked me one goddamn question you might want and i'm like holy shit and i'm like why do you think so you're a guy that knows this you teach this and it'd be interesting to hear your perspective on you know you say it's back to back but like what how do you how do you think that happens like what is it just because you're too crazy busy i just booked my time you know too much back to back are there other things going on i think that's a that's a part of it i think the i think the main thing that happens is you just you kind of get a little comfortable with your success and how good you are at what you do and therefore you just kind of like oh come on like i literally have this this you know 95 of this conversation i've had a thousand times before so how much different can it and this is what goes kind of i think not consciously but maybe subconsciously in your head like really do i really have to prepare for another company that has 30 sales reps well bound and it's like yeah yeah yeah whatever but it's funny because it's almost like it's like i i use it attuned to driving right i here's i mean i just kind of thinking this out loud but think about driving like driving is like riding a bike right you just okay fuck it and but as soon as you stop really like every once in a while when you stop paying attention when you're driving something fucked up happens you know what i mean like all of a sudden you're like you oh shit right and you're like oh my god oh my god and that's kind of where i think a lot of people go on autopilot because it's driving i'm i'm on the same roads i drive every day i take the same left turn every single day i know how to get to my dunkin donuts by cutting through people you know what i mean like and then every once in a while you take that for granted and you get in an accident so how do you train yourself how do you change that behavior i mean it doesn't happen frequently obviously to you but when that happens to you kind of does it kind of jolt you oh 100 and then you kind of like i don't want to be on cruise control but then it's like when you get pulled over by a police officer like you go slow for a while and then you're like speeding up again like a couple miles later yeah like like i said about once a year about once a year i kind of find myself getting into the hey i got so many other things going it's almost and as a business owner right i mean there's a million other things that we're focused on right trying to run a business manage people and those type of things and and look if sales was my 100 job and that was it that might not happen to me that might not because i could be prepared for everything but literally when you walk into a day where you got 15 meetings you have to have an investor call you have to do this you have to deal with customers who are pissed you have to do with all this other stuff and then there's a sales call that pops on your calendar out of all the things you prepare for that's an easy one to say eh fuck it you know what i mean like let me see what happens here but you know i noticed this too even with podcasts sometimes i'm invited on podcasts or i have people on and sometimes i phone a podcast in yeah right i don't do the research and it's fine it's whatever you know it's not gonna you know no one's listening anyway to my podcast but you you feel the difference when you prepare like you know howard stern when you listen to him interview a rogan like these guys are well prepared and the interviews are just better and it's more considerate someone's taking their time out i've had people on the podcast from kind of wing it they they know i know it's like dude haven't you read my book like this is like in chapter one it's like embarrassed you know it's it's the same kind of thing though totally and i and i think like so recently i had chris voss on my podcast oh my god dude what a genius and holy shit right and i was actually and that got me to be there because a lot of times i'll roll in a i'll check the i'll check the linkedin i'll look at what the person's doing but i ain't gonna read their fucking book and so and so you know but with chris voss i'm like i was definitely afraid of asking him questions that everybody else has already asked so i mean i spent hours prepping for that one you know what i mean i did you feel the difference like as opposed to obviously can't do that with that but you know you talk about tier one tier two tier three like this is a tier did you feel a difference as a as a as a host yeah yeah well you know what it did was it allowed me to ask i think more thoughtful questions in the sense it's the same thing with preparing for a meeting right like if i go to your and i go through my checklist right and okay what do you do and those type of things but when i actually look at your business and i do prep and i really come up with like questions that i'm i'm actually curious about that's where that's the key man those are the best those are the best qualification meetings i ever have because i'm real i'm genuinely curious right and i think that's what happened with chris voss was i was i mean fuck everybody else listen to that podcast i was there to learn you know what i mean and i was just like and there was a lot there's a lot of stuff that he talks about that actually conflicts with some of the stuff that i believe in and so i was kind of pushing him i'm like well okay but you know what i mean what and you know he had great answers for him some of my kind of was like all right whatever but others i was like yep nope you're fucking spot on on that one so you know i think the we i was having this uh i had a podcast this morning with sean fowler over at um at sales loft and the thing that we honed in on was like how do you teach genuine curiosity such a great topic right and and first like we have to even define that because people can think they're being curious but they're really and you could you could always tell like when you watch a stern love him or hate him if you watch stern interview anybody that guy's probably the best like in terms of curiosity he's in it man in it yep like he'll be good and you'll you can actually watch what he'll be going down a path and then the the person will say something and he'll go huh and go fucking that way you know what i mean and it's like yeah fuck everything that we were just about to talk about you just said something that was bananas fucking cool let's talk because i am like that is crazy shit right there right and i think that's the tell right like i was doing this was interesting i was doing a cold call coaching session and the woman picked up the phone the rep asked for permission to talk she goes yeah but i'm i'm getting my hair done i only have a minute and the rep went right into the pitch but if you were genuinely curious you might say what you're getting your hair are you getting it like it was a it was a woman talking to him you're getting a perm you get i don't know what the language is but you're getting a perm but i think that's you're exactly right i think that's the tell which is are you going off script are you going down are you zigging are you zagging yeah and and and it's that yeah and your spot like you can tell when somebody's just asking the questions yeah yeah yeah versus asking the question and saying fuck that was interesting you know what i mean like like whoa what and and it's funny because i'm watching morgan right my new guy morgan ingram you know i'm watching him go through that evolution of of kind of he was an sdr and an sdr manager but he had never done full cycle sales and so i'm watching him make that transition which is pretty cool yeah because when he was first doing the qualification stuff he was just going through his route and and he's now working with him he's kind of evolved to i can now listen to his calls and i can tell who he he finally got it you know and like he picked up on how did you coach him to that like taking the bumpers off the the bowling lane almost right i mean how do you get it's like a it's a science art thing right in the sense that it's um you know you got my opinion here you have to give them structure not scripts but structure to say okay ask the questions in this kind of order but here's how you can have and flow within that and we actually use costello so are you familiar with costello no i've heard of it so check out costello it's a kick-ass tool it's a note-taking tool where you can pre-build templates on how to take notes but then it feeds it's it's dynamic in the sense that it uses artificial intelligence to as you're taking the notes like save say you and i were talking i was like all right man you know what's um uh what's uh what's there's tech stack right and you're like oh we use salesforce and sales whatever right and and as i was typing that it would say bing bing bing hey um if they said that then ask these questions oh my god right or is that is that distracting or no you find it complimentary because it takes a little while to get used to and i think like you and me that have been in sales forever i think it would be um but i think for a kid who's just moving in it's necessary and so what we did was you know and then i listened to his calls through gong and that type of stuff and i'd be like i would highlight the area that i thought he missed because you i mean when i'm listening to a sales call we can hear where the client said something where you and i would stop the fucking presses and go all in on that whereas an untrained sales rep would just blast right through that right so i purposely highlight in all his calls there's the fucking point where you should have shut up and gone deep on that right because you missed it and i don't know if you know you missed it because you obviously did right but that's that's it and back in the day dude you and i we didn't have these tools like chorus dude like but we picked this shit up because like you know we were i don't know dude we were watching people doing it like like back in the day when they were learning how to be like a black you know learning how to put a thing on a horse like you just watch someone doing it and i've got all these tools but isn't it as simple as like just watch someone doing it and picking it up like i know we have these tools to make it more efficient but like there's part of me that's like man just like remember bob ross on tv used to paint the trees you're like you just watch the guy paint right so i use that as a perfect example right um science art um you know my first major in college was art right i didn't know that i didn't know that and i thought i was going to be a fucking artist and then i got first semester in and saw how wolf like i was the best artist in my 500 person basically right i get to a 35 000 student college at university of maryland and i sit in there and the first day i look at fucking these kids i'm like oh my god like i'm not that guy but like picasso's my favorite artist right but and i'd never be picasso but if you take if you give me a paint by numbers and tell me put yellow there orange there red there and that let me mix the colors i can come pretty damn close and that's kind of way i the way i look at leadership and sales is to it's kind of like you ever done paint night you ever done the paint night thing no what is that where are you based i actually didn't even look at that i have both where your grandparents probably live near me okay so i don't know if they have it around you but in boston and a bunch of other cities it's called paint night where you go to a bar with your date you know girlfriend or whatever it is and you you get hammered and somebody that and there's an easel for everybody with a paint set already set up and then there's the instructor and and what it is is they'll pick a painting so like monet or whatever right and they'll say we're going to paint that tonight and you're like and so now for me i look at it and i'm like all right cool i can kind of you know i can figure this out my wife on the other hand she's a scientist okay she's a she's a environmental scientist she's climate controller she's about the furthest thing from an artist you've ever seen okay she has trouble writing making stick figures okay so for somebody like her looking at a monet you'd be like how the fuck am i even going to come close to that but what the artist does is the artist says all right now pick up brush number three dip it in the blue paint the bottom corner of the bottom right hand corner in blue now pick up brush number two and dip it in yellow and pick the you know yellow and then at the end everybody's shit looks like the monet you know what i mean i mean some are better than others sure whatever you can recognize it you're like yeah that's that's scream right there you know what i mean so um i think that's kind of the way i look at sales enablement sales training leadership is to provide that framework so the reps can paint within the structure but still allow them to paint love it oh it's a great it's a great analogy it's a great analogy it's uh it's very bob it's very bob ross yeah yeah and you know but it's it's i don't know it's it's something that i think i think the new um uh new i think predictable revenue with the segmentation of roles i think that's significantly stunted growth of sales reps because to your point when you and i were growing up in sales it was hey here's a fucking territory kid like getting the fuck up right and and you were like okay so you had to pull call you had to meet you had to close you had to do all of it and the sad part the the bad part about that was that a lot of people who got into sales got out real fast because they were like i can't fucking do all this stuff it's a nightmare i'm out which which is bad because there's probably a lot of people that could have been great at sales but got scared away because they had to do too much totally now the barrier to entry is almost nothing like you're in your your barrier your your first sales job is an inbounds taking calls of people who want you to hit you know what i mean we even have i don't even remember the word inbound when i was coming up like no it wasn't such a thing there wasn't such a thing and then then you graduate so now it's gonna name this podcast two old guys talking about sales that's what we should name this yeah exactly back in my day there were no such thing that's inbound late it's a chorus actually that's pretty funny we should do one of those you know the old guys in the muppets are sitting about what do you want to chat about i mean like i think we could probably take i don't know we could have been done already i've been recording so i might just say fuck it this is a pretty good conversation i don't know dude i you know whatever you want i i thought what would be an interesting one uh if you want to jam on a little bit is uh we could talk about two things um one of them is i thought would be interesting which is this idea of messaging that always sounds too hypey like we are in a world where everyone's increasing everything by 50 percent or 100 percent or triple digits and it's it's starting to sound like six minute abs i love it and what do we do to not be so hypey so that people are less skeptical about what we're saying because i think when we're too hypey it's too unbelievable so we can talk a little about that definitely we can also talk about something else that i thought would be interesting too which is uh really would be in your domain something you're super good at uh which is this idea of how do you if you're a sales coach or a sales trainer or even a sales person and you want to teach someone something or explain something you've probably never been taught how to teach and just because you know something doesn't necessarily mean you can teach it and so what are some principles that you can learn to be able to explain things clearly because i get on discovery calls all the time and i'm like i don't understand or people tell me what they do at networking but i literally have no idea or i go approach a salesperson at a vendor booth i have literally no idea what they're talking about almost all literally and so and there's a there's a cost to that when you confuse people totally they don't listen you know we can talk about that too because because i think there's that that um that nervous energy if you will and i can sense it with morgan where he's so excited to talk to the person when it's his time to go it not only do the sometimes the the train of thought you can track the train of thought but he's he's put he pushed so many words into it that you kind of lose like okay wait a minute what the fuck do you do now and it's almost like you just want to stop and say look we do sales training and then be like okay and then the two sections are filling the funnel driving to close thumbs up okay now you know what i mean so it's like and i think this messaging piece because we're we're focused a lot right now on messaging of like sales ready messaging how do you how do you come with something that's going to wake people up totally and i and i and i used to be on the bandwagon of numbers are the best right hey we showed this client your industry how to triple their results and blah blah but i think again it's gotten so overused that people just don't trust it anymore they don't trust it and a lot of times those numbers are skewed right like when you really drill into that it's like one person that achieved that result but everybody there's like there's all that madness you know and it is in this world of fake news and fake this and promises i think those kind of promises and so how do you sound a little bit less hypey while still being able to get people interested in that and you're really i mean i could tell a great story i don't know you probably don't even remember this man the first day i met you uh it was at a conference with max when max was not as big as max is now yeah those first about 15 people watching you in a small room yeah and i'll never forget what you said that it actually changed who i am as a person and it changed my life and how i sell and changed changed everything was it was one sentence and i never forgot it and it was 12 years ago you had a screen up and it was some statistic and some guy in the audience asked you where that where's that statistic from and you said i don't know dude i have no idea i don't know i just read it somewhere and i was like i was expecting you to like cite something like a college professor and in that moment i'm like this guy is a is real that's the word that came to my mind like he's showing that he doesn't know he doesn't care it's not relevant i'm trying to make a point let's go on with our life and that is a very attractive trait in a salesperson to not have to think that you have all the answers in fact when you have all the answers if you've ever been around and know it all you don't like them like i've never liked being around someone that knows everything god so this this trait of being able to have in your arsenal i don't know i have no idea i think you said something like that right yeah it reminds me of you know cheryl crow a while back in florida was doing a concert and she forgot the lyrics to one of her most famous songs uh i don't even remember what the song was doesn't even matter but she forgot the lyrics and she just said you know i forgot the lyrics can anyone help me out and she put the microphone to the audience and they start singing the lyrics and they were with her because she kind of showed her vulnerability it's the same thing with messaging right if you take a look at messaging instead of saying we're going to increase your sale i got a message yesterday josh we're going to scale your sales dna company we're going to make you seven figures we're going to increase you this by 40 percent instead if you did it in a more john burrows less hypey way you might say something like this hey josh let's talk about how we can make you more money so you can afford to buy more cool triathlon stuff right like that that right there is going to be like oh more money is better than seven extra revenue seven million dollars like all these hypey claims they don't seem believable because they're just too hyped up it's like saying six minute apps yeah what if somebody comes up with five six yeah absolutely so all right cool man well let's i'm probably actually i'm probably gonna kick this like off just with our like battle conversation but let's kind of dig into some of that stuff now uh i'll just kind of do the formal break here and i'll let my guys cut up this however the fuck let me just uh let me just blow my nose real quick well crick i've been telling her about you for 15 years hi john burrows hi nice to meet you what's your name jenna jenna how are you jenna nice to meet you nice to meet you so yeah that's happening you're on it right now yeah we're on it right now it's not live don't worry it's not live we're gonna scale your company yeah we're gonna scale your company there you go good job there you go i love it love it all right dude i'm ready to go awesome man all right so i'll do a quick little intro what's up everybody make it happen monday flip it over to you kind of explain where you're coming from what sales dna is all about and then we'll dive right into it okay all right here we go good afternoon everybody this is john burrows make it happen monday hopefully you had a fantastic weekend i am very interested in our guest today because he is actually an example of when i fucked up hard in sales he's the he can remind me i was actually just reminded of it when we were having this conversation going god damn it uh we could get into that for a minute but josh um talk to everybody about you know what you're doing these days sales dna what that's all about where you're coming from introduce yourself to the audience here john burrows thanks for having me on and i am the guy that remembers when john burrows messed up so if you ever want to hit me up and you want to hear that story you can email me anytime i work for a company called sales dna and i help people sell things and that's what i do it's about as simple as it is what's the focus of sales dna i mean because i can kind of focus on like both of us like we help people sell shit but we're and this is i think the conversation we're going to have as far as messaging is concerned to simplify it but you know my focus is is you know prospecting and that negotiation piece like what are the sides of the sales process that you help out with yeah so the problem that i typically solve for people is when they're sending lots of emails or they're making lots of cold calls and they're hearing crickets and they are copying and pasting lots of templates they're doing 15 touches which by the way my wife didn't even want to be touch 15 times on our honeymoon let alone the plus don't even know who you are responses back that they want and they're wondering why because they've used every template and they've sequenced things 15 times and yet they're still not hearing anything back and so i help people start more conversations with people they want to get in front of love it man and we're saying we're in the same world and and i think there's a million ways to skin this cat right but one of the things that we started talking about um earlier is is the messaging right and how it's evolved like that's where we're focused a lot of our efforts on right now which is we call sales ready messaging right the difference between sales ready messaging and marketing messaging and and not too many people know the difference um and so help me understand like what are you seeing from a messaging standpoint that is is getting overused right now because i think we're both in the same page right now and then what then how do we how do we course correct here with where things are going so john how do you feel when you see an ad that says i can help you lose 40 pounds in 20 days so first of all i think it's bullshit um well if i lost 40 pounds i'd be a fucking stick i'm not jacked by any stretch man if i lost 40 pounds i would look like anyways um but but also um i i personally have a very big problem with the word help when it comes to prospecting because before you know me fuck you whether you can help you have no idea whether you can help me or not right like now middle of the sales process you know what i mean you can say hey john based on what i just learned about you this is how we can help and that's where i want to learn that but anytime i have a rep i actually shredded a rep one time who came in and told me they can help me with my conversion ratios and this was when i was selling outsource it services they're like oh we can help you do this i go really and i got up on my whiteboard and i literally mapped out every single conversion section of my of my sales process and i mapped out exactly what our conversion ratios were and how they actually compared to standards and i've mapped and they were better than every than anybody else and i was like so tell me again how you can help me and it fell apart so a i usually don't believe it b uh i have a real hard problem with people telling me they can help do shit before they know me so you're straight you're hitting on the number one problem which is most people that are selling haven't done the job of the person that they're selling to so i'm an sdr out of school or i'm an ae selling to a chief technology officer and because i don't know their job they can smell it right if you're a black belt in karate and a green belt is calling you to give you karate lessons you can smell it because it's not crispy your example is a great one they gave you a vague generic i can help you lose 40 pounds but meanwhile the real specific crispy thing is about 50 granular steps and you have to know your prospects job as well or if not better than them because i don't want to be talking to a green belt if i'm a black belt i'm a brown belt i want someone calling that's a black belt so that's that's the problem is how do i get to know my prospect's job specifically like we drill in like when they come to work every morning john what is he doing at 9 a.m what is he doing at 10 a.m is he taking 50 steps do i know what those 50 steps are and that's the core of the problem is that we're barking print i used to call this when i used to be an elementary school teacher we'd have these five-year-olds that could read fluently but then you ask them a comprehension question they had no idea what you're talking about and that's what's happening now with scripts when you kind of dig down and you ask what does that mean specifically at a crispy level you kind of get these i don't know i've just been told to kind of and you can smell that if you call john burroughs and you're not crispy selling it stuff in about five seconds you can smell that i would imagine a hundred percent and and i think that you know it's and truth be told on this one this is i don't know i don't know if do you do like actual training like full day stuff in front of the group right so so like yourself and ask this question next time and this is this is mind-blowing to me but it happened to me so i'm going to put myself in the same bucket um i was selling outsourced it services to to you know smb but a lot of times there's a cto cio who i was talking to whatever it is ask the question to a group of people who sell a technical solution to a cto cio ciso or whatever it is and ask them what the difference between a cio and a cio and a ctl is you'll get fucking cricket literally out of 40 people that i like who's in my class on a you know that type of thing if i ask that question maybe two or three hands will go up that actually know the difference and i'm not even talking about knowing what these people do on a day-to-day basis i'm talking about a fundamental job description of a cio compared to a cto and they're selling a technical solution and they don't know the difference yeah and and the problem with that john to your point is if i'm going to hire a personal trainer i don't want a personal trainer to say to me what do you want to work out today like i want to be talking to someone that can bring me new ideas and perspectives because everyone wants to get better it's a universal trait we all want to level up but if i can't bring you better if you if they're an eight and you're a two not a match right so let's talk a little bit about how do you how do you level up and improve your skills so that you can be an eight a nine or a ten i got a couple of ideas john and i would love to hear your perspective but one of them that i think is relatively easy is i always suggest that sdr start something that i call a lingo library google doc and sit in on discovery calls and forget about what the rep is saying just ignore the rep and just listen to what's going on in the company that actually is causing them to want to talk to a salesperson because no one wakes up and wants to talk to a rep something's going on in their company there's a bunch of struggles and things happening i don't wake up one day and decide i'm going to buy a seven thousand dollar tempur-pedic matrix a lot of things have to happen my wife has to be complaining and i have to flip the thing like seven times like the last thing i'm doing is walking into a tempur-pedic store to talk to a rep and what are those struggles happening like how do they use their words not marketing words but their lingo and just start a google doc and just start writing down the lingo i love that and this is also why i recommend doing uh stuff like um jumping into so now the cool thing that we're playing around with is like slack channels and those type of things and they're kind of taking the place of linkedin groups but i used to join linkedin groups of my personas that i was reaching out to not to troll for leads but literally just to listen to sit there and say what kind of questions are they asking what type of challenges are they trying to address and hey look if i can if i can chime in and add some value to that i will but these slack channels right now are great ways of just listening to those those words those trigger words and and and their lingo right to your point because once you can start to internalize that you can start to i don't believe you actually have to know everything about your product or solution or whatever it is to be successful i think you need to know enough to have context on your questions and layering your questions and be genuinely curious and then once you get to a point where you can tell you can make a difference then you bring the quote-unquote smart kids in like the sales engineers and those type of people right to actually answer those detailed questions but that's not the reason that people buy people buy because they make an emotional connection to something that is either going to make them want to money solve them solve their problems or whatever it is and the details are meant to make sure they're making the right decision right it's a great point oftentimes especially without bound and be curious to hear your perspective on this people don't really have problems right they're getting by just fine and you're calling them and from their perspective that's like i just take 20 steps to do this thing i'm not that's just how it is as a salesperson you have a unique ability to be able to say hey you know there's a there's a way to do this that might not be on your radar instead of it taking 20 steps are you aware that it can be done in six so it's not like there's a problem that they're coming to you with you're almost like a problem finder you're you're looking to see what are they doing and what are other people like them doing in a smarter way that they might not know about that's the advantage a salesperson has right the prospect is in their world but you are in lots of worlds and that's like crack to someone like i want to know what other people training for an iron man race are doing to not have to train 30 hours a week and ruin my marriage like i want to know like how do i do it in 10 if someone were to cold call me and say hey josh i know you're training for an iron man are you aware that instead of training for 30 hours you can train for 10 and get the same results i'm all ears man like what are you talking about and i and i think you're spot on with that and in my kind of mentality these days is like me calling to educate you on features and functions of shit i do like just cut this shit like that stuff is like google ruined that for sales in the sense that like it used to be our job right because you couldn't find out the information any other way like you didn't even know a solution like mine existed before the internet right before google and so it was 100 when i co-called you and said hey josh what's up i got this solution that can drive your sales by 30 and this is how we do it you'd be like well shit man i'd never heard of that before let's talk but now it's a google search away of anything right so i genuinely believe that our job from an outbound standpoint is is to get people to think to get you to realize that a you could be doing it better or b you might be fine today today but tomorrow who fucking knows what's going to happen there's going to be an app that comes out that makes your job irrelevant your industry is going to get fucked up by artificial intelligence so if you're not paying attention to the potential options out there you're you're you could get you could be irrelevant and that's what i think our job is is to get is to ask you that question to give you to say something to you that gets you to pause for three seconds and go shit i either a i didn't think of that or b what do you mean by that it's a great point i'll tell you a quick story my wife and i were in the mall i was trying to kill some time as i often do because she's in the shoe store for god knows how long and i just went into a running store i didn't need anything um i walked in and if the sales associate said what brings you in today nothing can i help you know but she didn't ask any of those things she noticed i was wearing running sneakers she goes you run i go yes she goes how long half marathons and full she goes have you ever had a gait test i go what is that she goes well jump on the treadmill and i jump on a treadmill she's videotaping me and it turns out i have pronated feet and she goes you know if you're running long distances and you have the wrong sneakers and you have pronated feet you could get injured and as an old jewish man trying to do a marathon that scares the bejesus out of me and 10 minutes later i'm buying 250 sneakers so i didn't walk in with a problem right and maybe it turns out i didn't have pronated feet but i could actually see on the video that my feet were in fact pronated and i don't know dude if maybe the sneakers were the right i don't know but i believed her like i believed it it's marketing and i'm i was in but that's to your point it's like we have to be we have to be looking out for how we can help people be a little happier they might not know what's it's about what's possible right and to your point what what bad thing is about to happen to me if by running in the wrong sneakers like tomorrow what do i not know right i want to talk about something else john that you mentioned in the pre-show which is this idea of percentages you know everybody and i'm not dude i learned sales from you and i'm going to tell us i want to get to this story about how my first interaction with you because i think it really dovetails into this so stay tuned for that it's a great story but this idea of like we can increase this by 20 and we do this by 100 and we these messages to me sound like the equivalent of saying we can get you you know six minute abs in eight minutes and even if it's true which it probably isn't right if we had a stats guy looking at it it's like maybe one person that achievement it's it's noise because it's unbelievable because everyone's claiming it so in our messaging john would love to hear your thoughts i have some as well i'm like how do i sound less hypey so that i don't come across as the six minute ab person right yeah i mean it's tough because i'm struggling with this myself i i mean you you heard you said it like i used to train and i still do to a certain degree but only when it's so relevant that it makes a connection so i always say the easiest way to come up with a message is to look at the bottom of a case study and then flip that around and say hey you know what we showed this client in your industry how to do this and usually there's a result tied to it right increase their this decrease that whatever it is and the idea there is okay and look i don't know if we can do it for you but you fit a very similar profile to this client so is it worth a conversation right and i used to be very very heavy on metrics like metrics like everybody speaks you know executives speak excel everybody else speaks word you know that was a whole tagline um but to your point it's it's it's gotten so overused that it's kind of like as soon as you see it's almost like if we die even if we dissect um uh the the why you why you now email right the jeff hoffman why you why you now email that i train there's still part of my training but it's a small um you know small nuance here selling 15 minutes right hey what's the best way to get 15 minutes on your calendar i've stopped doing that you know why because everybody sells 15 minutes and now so i just pick another number or like i was researching your account i've stopped saying the word researching because now marketing has picked up on researching and i've been doing some like research on on um on psychology and brain patterns and those type of things and what's interesting is like the brain picks up on patterns eventually whether you know consciously or subconsciously it picks up on patterns and once it recognizes a pattern it stops paying attention to it it just kind of disregards it so it's almost like it's the why you why you now email which is three you know three sections and a call to action and three clients no matter how customized it is now if you see that enough you're like fuck it this is another one of those things right if i see 15 minutes it's another if i see another value proposition with a number in it it's like i don't believe it and so i now it's that that next iteration and i think it gets a little bit more towards persona the challenges that people face and and and i'll stop after this the one thing i've uh you know i don't know if you're following a lot of the gong data like gong uh right they have their blog is one of my favorite blogs and and you know they talk about how when people tell stories they tend to focus way too much on the outcome like the after like look at this fucking look at what happened this client was able to do all these crazy things but they but what their data suggests is improves is that you have to focus more on the before than the after so you have to get me to come you have to get me to agree that yeah that's me right because the data suggests like if you just drop name drop for instance if you just not like hey i work with salesforce and linkedin and google and that type of stuff look if you're in that realm then those are great testimonials and stories to use but if you're not in that it's using name dropping those companies like significantly reduce reduces your chances of getting the deal so the whole thing about relating first and then i think is where the shift needs to become it's like you need to start asking me questions forget about statements about how awesome you are ask me a question that gets me to go fuck man i didn't think of that or shit you're right you know what i mean that type of thing it's a great point we're talking about what you're saying and how you're saying it right so jason freed over at base camp when i worked for him he calls this the why behind the why right so he's a great copywriter and to your point he doesn't talk about the after state of base camp if you look at their copy it's all about what was going on that brought them to the base camp site so you'll see things like buried in email not sure where to find the latest file not getting everyone on the same page these are things that you're struggling with as your company starts to grow and there's always a story and he doesn't say are you struggling he's like struggling with it's just a more cat it's a more casual conversational way to write and i think in our emails we feel like we have to write by the book and we have to write by the templates and to your point it's what advertising legend david trott calls you're a white circle in a sea of white circles and the brain ignores it just like you ignore every car in the road and so to be a red x you don't have to write 170 character email if you're interesting and you're entertaining and you're relevant and you having a little personality and people are relating to their world because you're using their words they will keep reading even if it's longer than 170 characters so that's the other piece of it no i think that it's spot on as far as the why you know what i mean in the connection that you make to people in the genuine connection i think that's the the thing i'm struggling with the most right now from a trainer standpoint or from a teacher an educator um in some ways is is to how do you expedite the giving a shit factor right like like and and i use this i've said this a couple of times recently where you know morgan came to me uh a little a while back and you know he was he was an str and str manager and he he you know we came up with our sequences and our cadences and you know he came over to me and we're selling and all that stuff and he was doing a really good job and but then his results kind of plateaued and and he was like well john you know i'm a little concerned here because i feel like my results should be a lot better than what they are based on what we've done and he's like you know what do i need to do and i and i thought about it for a little bit and i said you know what morgan um the you know the only time your your results are going to change is is when you start giving a shit and i said that in a way like not necessarily look i know you give a shit about your job i know you give a shit about working here all that stuff but when you start when when you start giving a shit about the customer genuinely giving a shit about the customer what their situation is what maybe their pain points are those type of things reading up on them like really reading up on them not just looking for a trigger to make a connection to that's when you'll start to see it and i think there's a little bit of experience necessary for that to happen because for him where he started to kind of catch his sales group is when he started doing enough trainings right delivering trainings and he started getting the feedback from the people saying oh my god thank you so much look at the results i drove like morgan that one day was the best fucking day i've ever spent my you know when he started getting that feedback and internalizing holy shit we make a difference here is when he started to get a lot better results because he could just then translate translate that to somebody in that scenario so how do you define genuinely curious though because you use that word a lot and i kind of get it conceptually but what does that mean exactly when you say genuinely because i'm like i'm curious i'm asking questions yeah genuinely curious giving a shit you know what i like i it's hard to define because because i've i've i'm you know if you think of like the things we're all blessed with like i i've always been very curious and people like there's certain people i don't give a shit i literally don't care about i'm like yeah okay that that's boring as shit i am not curious about that at all but based on my profession and what i do um and people who i converse with like i i know i'm not i'm a state school kid man i i drank my way through four years of college i i i learned through experience i learned through podcasts like this you know what i mean um asking people like you questions about what your thoughts are on those type of things so you know it's always been there but to me it's when you like when you here's here's how i would i guess articulate it which is you go into a meeting and you have five or six questions that you've prepared right so you've kind of followed the gong data you got three themes that you're following you got 12 to 14 questions that you're going to ask based on this qualification criteria and all that other stuff and then it's the howard stern comment that i made earlier which is all of a sudden you know midway through this conversation you say something that's like well what like and takes you down a completely different track than you were planning okay and it's based on just being like wait a minute like now i don't care about all that other stuff that that i had because that is now something that either i can tell is a real big pain point for you or is going to be the thing that is the reason i'm not going to win this deal so i'm going to stop the presses here and i'm going to go into that and genuinely care because what i'm searching for is i always tell people this look i'm trying to make this kind of a difference like for a big difference like if i can only make a little bit of a better difference of like if if my shit compared to yours is a little bit better like why go through the transition and the pain and this but but like i'm trying to hunt for this like where i can walk out and go oh my god i made a difference and if i can't i'm actually gonna be the first one that tells you yeah you know what we're not a good fit here i'm good i'm not great in this scenario this is where i'm great and and i think i don't know if it's maturity i don't know if it's nature nurture um but that genuine curiosity has really done me a lot of favors in my life um to get to where i am well i think you're bringing up a good point which is we start with intent right if your intent is to ask questions so i can sell like i'm asking questions that i could sell rather than what i'm hearing you say which is i'm not assuming that what i have is what someone needs because the juice might not be worth the squeeze there's a lot of look when i hire john burrows if he messes up my job's on the line i could have a bad reputation one of them says that sales reps don't like him which by the way never happens so if you're thinking about harrowing giant barrels that this is just a hypothetical scenario for clarity but i'm just saying that's the that's what you don't when you start to interview customers and you start to have a buyer-centric mindset you have to think of all the anxieties that people have it's a big deal to spend 50 grand like on my job is it going to work am i going to get a bad reputation and you start to have some more empathy and when you have empathy you don't come in with that commission breath because people can smell when you're leading them um with questions which brings me to another point that i want to talk about john that i think uh you're super good at which is this idea of being authentic real and vulnerable and i just want to tell this story really briefly because it's stuck with me for i don't know 14 years i met john before he was you know big john burrows he was just coming up he was still the greatest but he was 15 i got to see him when there was 15 people in a room i think it was boston sales hacker but when sales hacker was small yeah before max was famous like he is now you could actually talk to max not now i email max i don't hear back you know max anyway um so i'm in the the fifth row and john's going through his presentation and he gets to a slide and the slide has some stat on it and some guy in the audience raises his hand and says to john hey john where's that stat from now most of the time when you see slides there's that little tiny eight point font on the bottom but john didn't have that slide and i was expecting john to be able to cite it like a college student would citing a citation and john says i have no idea where i got it from i just you know i thought it was interesting and you know i don't i have no idea and i'm i was really taken back by that because you don't expect a salesperson that's making a presentation in front of a bunch of people to say i don't know and i think that's a really admirable trait i think when you're vulnerable and you say you don't know you're attracted to that person because nobody i don't know you john but i don't like to be around people that know everything it's annoying and you're and you were so real in that moment and you're like i don't remember the exact words you used but it was something like dude i i don't know i just found it somewhere and anyway this is why i thought it was interesting let's let's kind of keep going on and you were you were really real in that moment and i think we're missing that today i think there's this idea that we have to be so serious and so buttoned up and know everything that we lose that that sense you know for making a cold call and somebody picks up the phone and you ask them for permission they say hey i have a couple minutes i'm getting my haircut you don't go into your pitch you're like you're getting your haircut are you getting like a weave are you getting a bob you know you have to stay and you're so good at that john but how do you like what are your thoughts on this idea of vulnerability and riffing and being in the moment and just being yourself i mean no one's john burrows but everyone can be their own version of who they are yeah i think it comes i think you need somebody i mean look i'm i i've always been pretty you know upfront and honest mainly because i suck at lying and and and and i know i'm not the smartest kid in the room you know what i mean i didn't go to the harvard's the mit's of the world i went to a state school and and had fun um but i think that that leadership has a lot to do with that and allowing for that failure um and a lot and encouraging it as a matter is it even fail is it failure though i'm like is it failure i mean like it's okay to say i don't know it's okay to fuck up it's okay to click the wrong slide in your presentation you know what i mean i'm not going to come down and hammer you on it but i think unfortunately what we've done is we've gotten into a world where perfection matters you know what i mean everybody's trying to say the perfect thing or have the perfect template or get the perfect score on the mcast so they can get into the perfect college so they can have the perfect it's like and and i think we're in this social world of like you know i always like you know instagram and facebook and shit like that everybody's presenting this front of how awesome they are and there's people that i am friends with that i look at what i mean if you just judge them based on their instagram page like oh my god that's the happiest family i've ever seen in my life they're the most perfect thing i've ever seen and but knowing them i'm like they're a fucking train wreck you know what i mean like they i was over in our house the other day and the fucking guy screamed at his kids and they ran out and you know it was right from this and you know it's like so so i think we're just caught in this perception reality worlds of everybody thinks that they need to be this thing and it was funny because you know my blog posts these days you know i've been writing a blog for now five years and it's getting hard for coming up with new shit to say right weekly so every once in a while i'll repost something that i posted a few few months or years back or something like that um and and there's just repost it or will you skin it or will you like put a new skin on it i'll clean it up a little bit just to make sure it's relevant for the day but whatever but for the most part like you know 90 of it i i kind of not all like probably one out of four per month i'll repurpose right but one of them that i was thinking about recently was this one that i wrote a while about called called stop doing what you're supposed to do and and it's the kind and two things happened in my life that woke me up a little bit of that i was going through the motions because i was doing what i thought i was supposed to do and it was one of them was a personal one where i was uh senior year in college i met this girl like fell in love blah blah blah moved back to boston moved her with me seven years later we're still together okay so seven years actually i'm sorry it was my freshman year in college seven years and later later i'm still with her okay i knew the relationship wasn't right i knew it didn't feel right to me right something was off but i you know i how long did it take you to know that like how'd you like was that i just it was it was a but it i was so what do you do after seven years when you're with somebody for seven years what do you do you get married right that's what you're supposed to do after that long then what do you do you're supposed to buy a house right and then you're supposed to have a kid right so i was literally on that path and even though i felt wrong about it and thank god she broke it off with me because at first i thought i i was devastated i was like oh my god like oh but then i woke up like literally two days later and was like it was like this weight was lifted off my shoulders and i was like oh my holy shit right so that was moment one moment two was when my company my first company got bought by staples i you know i i thought i was the guy to take our little 10 million dollar company and integrated into this 20 billion dollar organization and it was my new challenge and everything about it was wrong like they like i'm not a corporate guy obviously right i'll fucking zero filter i'll call bullshit on anybody i don't care how high up in the organization you are and i don't fit into the corporate world right i like working with corporations i can't work in corporations so but and i knew it was wrong but i kept fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting because it was what you're supposed to do i'm not supposed to quit like that's that's for fucking quitters and then they fired me and again i was like wait a minute that was my company i built this company this is my thing you can't fire me and and and then i again two days later woke up and said so i think those two really had an impression on me about cut the shit stop going through the motions wake the fuck up start making your own decisions and doing if you have the right intentions in mind so i think you said a great word there which is intent if you have genuinely good intentions of really helping people and not doing it for your commission check then you can and should and do whatever it is necessary to be real with that person to make that connection yeah and i think to kind of dovetail that i make it a little more tactical like even on on cold calls i mean i do a lot of training on cold calls and you do as well and people are sticking to these scripts but i i did a cold call yesterday i do cold calls on behalf of my companies that i work with and a woman picked up the phone and she was in california and she said you know i'm really uh i'm pressed for time right now i gotta go grab some lunch now rather than saying the typical thing can i call you back can i give 37 seconds to see if this is interesting the usual suspects of how do you try to keep someone on the phone she gave me a little something which was she's going to lunch so when you get something like that you have to do something with it so she was in california and i said to her are you having avocado toast with himalayan sea salt is that what you guys do in california and she started cracking up laughing how did you know i was having avocado now did i know no could that have bombed yes but you want to have a little fun with it and when that hits which it does it does it will when you find your own rhythm you the the calls are just the defenses just go down because there's nothing like being real and it wasn't the dude to get a sale it was just something that came into my head at the moment i also use a a comedy principle called the rule of three so wendy lieberman's a stand-up comedian she has this joke hey uh to her husband i just bought you a present it's a three-piece bikini it's a top for me a bottom for me in a blindfold for you so it's the the usual thing usual thing on the other you can use that in sales too right so hey i'm calling you to talk about you know how you can start more conversations with people how you can uh maybe close more deals and also if you're interested how to learn the solo to guitar to hotel california which i know you've probably been working on for a while like it's that idea to loosen up a little bit in your emails and your cold calls and to react to someone saying i got i'm getting a haircut or i'm going for lunch or if you hear them biting something they're eating something or if you hear them picking up the phone sometime and they're laughing because someone was telling them a joke like you got to stay in that and to your point john just be not so rigid and just feel a little loose and that's what i think you're the best at like when my when i came up and you were certainly my mentor and role model like this guy is different because he's real like he's a real person authentic and you are you and i think it's not just what you're selling it's who you are on these calls like you have an opportunity to be really memorable because so many people are so stiff and it's it's sad you know like um uh i was at rainmaker this year and um you know i did my keynote you know kevin dorsey by any chance of course i'm a huge fan love kevin right so him and i were talking because he did his speech too and both of us had the same experience usually when some like you or i speak or kevin speaks right usually well i don't know about you but my goal is for people to come up and say holy shit john that that was like super interesting or whatever like the topic right like what i talked about is was what they come back away with and you know how i presented it okay great but this time almost all the feedback was you know what man i really appreciate you know you being up on stage here because because i just i loved how authentic you were i loved how real you were it had nothing to do with my content it had nothing to do with what i said it was how i said it and how and kevin had the same example like he was like and both of us were like what the fuck like this is uncomfortable that this is a thing that that being real being honest and being authentic is actually a differentiator these days it is it is totally but it's true it's absolutely and i think it's all and i think it's a great opportunity and i think we should give people permission to uh to be them just be just be you stop trying to be everybody else right and just be you and find that groove right and and i'll kind of finish with one of my favorite uh you know examples of this and and i'm sure i probably already said you probably know it my favorite sales movie which is tommy boy right and and and and tommy boy if you look at i always call it catching your sales groove right where there's a moment where you wake up and it's just a little bit easier right and and the chicken wings helen you look like oh helen you know that type of thing well if you think about that movie up until that movie he was trying to be his dad right you stick your head up a butcher's ass but no that's not the right thing right and and then all of a sudden he was just tommy boy you know what i mean he was just hip-shit self and and made fun of himself self-deprecating and the woman was like wow you're twisted i'll go fire up those wings for you and that's the groove that i think we need people permission and i think leadership has to encourage it i think leadership has to encourage mistakes i think they have to encourage reps to say i don't know and you don't have to be perfect on that test you know like stop getting out of the mcast stop getting out of that type of mentality of standardized testing and just think for yourself for a little bit and give a shit so love it great message john bros i don't know who interviewed who but i loved it anyway this is what this is all about look we gotta end the hour here i do think what i'm gonna do here though is i think i'm just gonna start this podcast straight up from the front because i think that first part of the 10-20 minutes that we were talking was fire too and that's where people will hear the story of when i fucked up with you and jellyvision so uh but um but look um tell people about sales dna how can they learn more what are you guys up to tell me yeah quick quick plug uh sales dna.co slash badass so i have a guide that costs a bunch of money but if you want to learn why go to sales dna.co slash badass and you'll see videos and testimonials about why sales reps have bought it so you don't have to hear from me you can hear from them john thank you for having me on the show dude as you know i've been a huge fan you've been a huge mentor to me and i'm super honored and privileged to uh to be on your show today yeah and i appreciate it josh and and especially seeing where you've come you know what i mean and doing this right to help elevate the profession i mean you know this to me is uh it's the greatest profession in the world when done right and the worst one done wrong so i i always love people who are doing it right and trying to raise the tide here so really appreciate everything you're doing there man thanks for having me on john all right everybody well hopefully you got some value out of this as usual and like i say go out today and make somebody happy uh nothing else today but make somebody smile you know you're on a good day so have a great week everybody make it happen go bruins so so so so so so so so so so you you you