109: Building A Winning Sales Mentality & Growing With Sean Sheppard

Thank you to our partners, SalesLoft, LeadIQ, and Costello for helping us put this one on. Find all our upcoming events at jbarrows.com slash events. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrows. Make it happen Monday. Hopefully, y'all had a fantastic weekend. I have an extremely interesting guest with me today because I've actually met this gentleman a few years back when he had done something that I had been dreaming about my entire career, which is to create almost like a sales academy, if you will, because it is an educated profession. Even though it's the most important profession on the planet and dictates everything that every business does. Sean had put this together to help educate sales reps the right way coming out of college.

Now he's doing some cool stuff with startups and everything. Sean, you want to introduce yourself to everybody here? Thanks, John. My name is Sean Shepard. I'm one of the founding partners of GrowthX and GrowthX Academy. I'm a five-time selling founder. I've had three successful exits and one really valuable learning experience along the way. And I've always been a professional salesperson or unprofessional for many years, as it were. And I never understood why over 50% of college graduates end up in sales with no background experience or training. And you go back all the way to the age of the industrial revolution when sales was first professionalized by NCR Corporation and then Tom Watson at IBM, when we had to create repeatable, scalable sales methodologies, processes, and train and educate people to do it.

And it always got a negative stereotype, whether it was the snake oil of the 19th century in the old West, or it was Willie Loman and the death of a salesman, or the retail salesperson who perpetuates the myth with no training at all and is forced to push things on you in a very transactional way. And our academic system is a lead and pompous as it is, has always looked down upon it. And, and, and so I always had this vision of, of why aren't we educating people and embracing the fact that this is the greatest profession in the world. You know, we have the highest average earned income of any white collar role. We have the lowest divorce rate. No shit. Is that true? It's true. Communicate. There you go.

Okay. We have, we have the lowest suicide rate. No shit. Yes. And we have one of the highest average quality of life is polled by any general profession. Wow. So that I will say the divorce and the suicide is actually pretty shocking to me. I would actually think we were a little bit higher on both. Like I'd say we were on the higher end because of the stress level involved in sales. But to your point on the communication, that makes total sense. Well, I mean, dentists and doctors are killing themselves every day. Um, and, uh, and their divorce rates are incredibly high. Huh? Ponders, public, public servants. I mean, there's a whole host of these, but we have a pretty damn good life and it's a very valuable role.

And when you ask leaders in business, the most valuable role in the organization, it's the sales professional. They, because as you know, as well, as I do, nothing happens until somebody sells something, you know, even the Bible was wrong when it talked about the oldest profession. It had to be sold first. I have that line all the time. Everyone's like, yeah, I'm a prostitution. I go, no, no, no. She had to sell it first. Now don't get me wrong. Probably wasn't exactly a hard sale, but it had to be sold first. Right. But what is sales other than trying to understand what somebody wants and then giving it to them? That's, and, and I mean, to boil it down that simply, that's really what it is.

Right. It's not, I think that the perception is I'm trying to convince you of something that you don't need. Right. That's the negative perception of it is, but excuse me, but the reality is I'm just trying to ask you some questions to figure out what you actually need and then make a connection to what I got. Right. And if it helps, it helps. If it doesn't, it doesn't. I move on. And if you have that, I tell people this all the time, I said, look, I actually like, if you take what people's mentality is around sales, I actually say, I don't sell you shit. I either help you achieve your goals or solve your problems. And if I, and if my solution can't help you achieve your goals or solve your problems, then let's stop talking here because like there's no reason for us to continue this conversation, but I got to ask you some questions to uncover it because you might not see the connection yet.

Right. That's right. No one cares about your products. They care about their problems and whether or not you might be able to solve them. That's why I like to call products byproducts. Byproducts are being fully immersed in the experience of trying to give people what they want. Yeah. And so if you think about now, okay, let's say sales is, and I, and you and I are both on the same page. We've talked about this a lot of times. We want to elevate the profession of sales in society to its rightful place alongside being an accountant, a doctor, a lawyer, well, not a lawyer. Yeah. You get my point. And so if you do that, and if you rethink sales as a profession, how do you educate people from, from day one forward?

Right. And you just gave me a sneak peek into your new book, which I think is super awesome. I'm not going to spill the beans for you. Yeah. It's still secret. It's still secret. It is, but, but I haven't seen anything more foundational in the form of a book or elegant in terms of what life would be like if we all said when we were growing up, hmm, I'll consider sales as a profession, yet we all end up in the same place. We go to, we go, we go to college and those that aren't in STEM roles, right, that have very specific college level based requirements to get into a certain kind of job or role or function in society, they end up in liberal arts colleges. That was the last time you saw a job posting that said seeking liberal artists.

Yeah, never. You spent 250 grand on this bullshit education. Yeah. My daughter didn't want to be a doctor and she's off to Gonzaga in four weeks. Yes, congrats. Fellowship of pre-med and physics and she's super smart. I love her to death. She's definitely been raised by her mother. I would tell her no. I mean, go, go, go get a job, go to the JUCO route for a couple of years, save the family a bunch of money because it's all a bunch of nonsense. I'll say the same thing to my son. So when I was faced with the reality of, so here's another statistic. Every year come May when graduation season comes around in the universities, all the major media outlets prop out the same article over and over again.

They poll college provosts and ask them if their graduates are ready for the workforce. 80%, 90% of them say yes. Then you go to the employers and you ask them if the people that they're hiring out of these roles are ready for the workforce, 90% of them say no. So there's a massive gap there, right? And it's what I call a workforce readiness gap. And I've seen it throughout my entire career, growing and building companies and sales teams, just like you have, that if you choose a role in sales or chooses you because you don't know what else to do, which is often the case, you're now at the mercy of that company and your leadership, that direct hiring manager, that direct sales manager, that direct coach as to whether or not you success, you succeed or fail, grow, develop, or decide that this industry is for you or isn't for you.

And why is with everything that we've done, turnover and sales still endemically on average 55 to 60%? I think it's because of those very things. And so if we address it as a society as a whole very differently, and we view sales on that same level as different professions, and we start to invest in educating people, training, supporting, coaching, and developing them from a young age all the way through to that opportunity, things will be very, very different in my view. Yeah. And so, and I will give people, this is the first time I'm showing this, but I will give people a very small sneak peek of what I gave you, which is this, what I want to be in, this is my book, I want to be in sales when I grow up.

And it's- I love it. I love it. Because- John, you and I were talking about it just before we came on the air that I said, nobody says that when they're a kid. And then you went, oh yeah, well, look at this. I just wrote this. Great. And the idea there, like, because I'll be damned. So the way I look at it is like, you know, I'm going to be very concrete in this sense of where my fear is, like artificial intelligence, right? I call artificial intelligence like the eye of Sauron, in the sense that if the eye of Sauron all of a sudden gets on your industry, right? So all those kids, for instance, that went to school, like, I think some of the worst advice I had heard about five years ago was be a coder.

Oh, coding, coding, coding, coding, going to coding. Like, it's going to be a huge career for you. Are you out of your fucking mind? Like within like a year or two, artificial intelligence is going to be able to code so much better than you will ever be able to code. Now, don't get me wrong. There's going to be those savants that sit on the top of the coding pyramid, right? And those are the people that are going to dictate what the computers do. But the other 99% of kids that went into school for coding and all of a sudden artificial intelligence comes on their industry, what are you going to do? Now you've got to go back to school to figure something else out. If you're in sales, if the eye of Sauron hits your industry, fuck it, I'll just go sell something else.

You know what I mean? So a couple of things I would say about that. So I did this talk on EI in the age of AI, right? Emotional intelligence in the age of artificial intelligence. So why will there be people above that AI? And we've got a portfolio company at GrowthX in GrowthX Fund 2 that is all about automating the coding called Boss Framework. And they're cutting the development time and cost by 60%, almost out of the gate. And they're just getting started. So where do you add value outside of that? With creativity, with curiosity, with empathy, with critical thinking and problem solving skills, with understanding how these things impact the world? That's where you're different. And that's why anything that's easy to do gets automated.

If it's repetitive, it will get automated. And it's not a reason for people to freak out. No. We've been through this four times. This is the fourth industrial revolution, this innovation economy. The last one, when the last one happened in 1900, 40% of the jobs in America were ag jobs, farming, agrarian. Today, 3% of the jobs are ag jobs. We don't have 37% unemployment. Right. Every new solution and every new technology creates a new set of problems and challenges that we need to face. And when we're in sales, when we're creative, when we have business acumen, when we care about people and we know how to effectively communicate that, we understand a domain or an area of expertise, we can be super successful and separate ourselves, not just from the robots, but from the other salespeople that are too fucking lazy to do it.

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent of them. Well, let me ask you, like on that point, what worries me, so you're right, we've had four revolutions, right? And what I've, and I'm not a history buff by any stretch, but the education- I am. I'm sick about it, so- Yeah, and that's why I'm asking you these questions. You know, one of the stats, and I'm not, like, the reason I wrote a children's book, because I don't like reading. So, yeah, exactly. So, no, but, but throughout those, like when we went from agriculture to the industrial revolution, right, our education system changed. We now realize we have to educate them on manufacturing and those types of things. So there was a distinct shift in our education model.

Then, then when we came into the, the kind of the new, the, the, the workforce model now with white collar work and all that other stuff, again, we shifted our education structure to address that. We're now moving into the technology age, and I am not seeing our education system shift to help empower the kids with the tools that they need to succeed in this new world that we're going into. Why not? I love that. So, so you go back to, and we talk about this a lot. If you go back to 150 years ago, and you fell asleep, and say you were, you know, Rip Van Winkle, and you woke up today, and you looked around, the only thing that would look the same is a classroom. No shit. Exactly. The only thing.

So they were designed in that industrial revolution to take kids off of farms and teach them how to work in factories. Why do we have three months off for school? We have three months off for school because that was harvest season. So the parents needed the kids to come back to the farms and pick the cotton, pull the corn and shuck the whatever, right? And it's ridiculous. Now I'm starting to finally see some schools do, or some systems do year-round schools. For example, in Arizona, in a school district where we own a home, and we used to live many years ago, they are on a year-round school system. They get two weeks off in the fall. They get their two weeks, they get their Christmas break of two and a half, three weeks.

They get two weeks off in the spring, and then they get six weeks of summer. And then they're back at school already. They went back to school a week ago. See? So now it's not, oh, the kids need the break. No, bullshit. We don't get unlimited PTO. Well, I mean, technically, in the Valley, unlimited PTO is a thing. Yeah. That's a sabbatical. That's called a sabbatical. For example, did you know why school bells were made? Because they were made to mimic factory whistles. Really? All part of the training. Lining up people in desks in rows and teaching them how to do rote things. And the only thing kids in the same class have in common, John, is their age and their location. And none of us learn the same.

No. So to your point, we've taken at GrowthX Academy, which we launched to solve this problem we were talking about, was to address sales education and workforce readiness. And not just for sales, but it's within the context of what we do at GrowthX, which is we invest in seed stage technology startups. We help them grow with the roles that matter for growth, which are sales, marketing, design thinking, okay? And so teaching sales in a way that helps accelerate learning. So we know so much more about the brain and how it works now. We know so much more about how and when it develops, depending on age, gender, environment, trauma, et cetera. And we know that the number one principle in accelerated learning is direct experience.

So direct experience means I want you working on real projects with real companies surrounded by a community of people who are going to be there to help you when you screw up, because you're going to screw up. Because if you're not screwing up, you're not trying. You're going to add real value and build a portfolio of experience by working with real companies that may or may not hire you. Those companies are going to get value. The whole community is going to learn from it. And then the mentor community of the John Barrows of the world, of who you are, a mentor for GrowthX Academy, are going to be able to hire you, use you as an intern. You're going to learn about yourself. And then you do this in what we call a flipped mastery approach, which is when we grew up, we were given, we go in the classroom, we're given a lecture, we're given homework, we went home, and alone we had to struggle through it.

Well, today, in a flipped classroom model, what's more effective is to do the opposite. Okay, we're going to give you some stuff to go home and read your own concepts, and you're going to work through them, and you're going to come back in, and we're going to work through them together. Okay? And we're going to do this in a way that's collaborative, interactive, and safe for everybody to learn. And then we're going to focus on the individual and how they learn. And then we're going to give the individual the opportunity to identify their own, let's say, person-company fit. as opposed to product-market fit. Who am I? What's my natural, where are my natural tendencies based on my DNA and how my brain is wired?

What did I enjoy doing as a child? And how does that translate into what I could do as an adult? And then you start to build your own story. And then you layer on the skill sets required to be successful in this fourth industrial revolution, or what I call the innovation economy. I did this article for Inc. about, this whole thing. Like, what are the skills that matter most today? The first, in my view, is mindset. So number one, you've got to have a growth mindset. You need to be a learn it all, not a know-it-all. You need to remove the word rejection from your vocabulary and replace it with feedback. And say, feedback is a gift. I want it. Every time I pick up the phone to call a stranger, I want feedback from them.

I want honest feedback. And I want to accept that because I want to be better at helping them and myself. Because in the innovation economy, there's no distinction between the person and the profession. You develop yourself as a person, you will develop yourself as a professional. Now, once you have that mindset, now you can go after the second step, which is business acumen. Yeah. You need to understand how what you sell to somebody helps them run their business in a quantifiable way. Because if you don't understand your customers, customers, customers, customers, the entire value chain, you won't be able to connect the dots in that small moment where you have their attention. And then the third is market acumen.

How do you take that skill set, that mindset and that business acumen and apply it to different industries to go from financial services to CPG, to enterprise software as a service, to networking hardware technology, to cybersecurity, to retail, to wholesale. I don't care. Pick it. You and I can walk into any room and probably run a conversation with a customer for the first time or a cold call better than anybody that we're training or coaching because we understand how to apply that. Right. Right. And so people need to know how to be that agile. Why? Because the job and role and function and value that they're going to be delivering is going to change faster now than it ever has. In 1970, the average turnover in the S&P 500 was 75 years.

In other words, it took 75 years for a company to fall off. Jesus. Today, it's 15. Yeah. By 2030, it's predicted that 37, 40 percent of that, of the S&P 500 aren't even on it today. Wow. And you probably haven't even heard of them. Wow. Yeah. And Jeff Bezos just came out last year at a shareholder meeting and honestly said, we're doing great, but I'm worried we may not exist in 20 years. I wouldn't be surprised. Think about it. They don't own shit. They don't own anything except the three things that create a lasting mover advantage, which we're going to talk about in a few minutes. Yeah. But once you have mindset, business acumen, and market acumen, you now need the last most important thing, which is communication skills.

You need to learn how to take all the things from your mindset, your business acumen, and your market acumen and communicate that value back out to the marketplace, whether that's to your boss, to your co-workers, to your children, or to your customers. Because at the end of the day, a company is just a group of humans, and it's humans that make people happy and sad. It's not about what you're selling or to who you're selling or why you're selling it. Right? It's about who you're with. And so you have to build a skill set and then an understanding of who you are and what kind of people you like to work with and what kind of value you want to deliver to the world to create meaning and purpose, which is the only thing that's going to keep you from shooting yourself in the head or taking too many opioids.

Yep. So let me dive in real quick, because you said something before we jumped on here about like kind of hacking your sales career. And if we were to take each one of those things, the growth mindset, say you're not in a growth mindset, say you're not a school, you don't know what the hell you don't know, right? And you're just trying to get a job or whatever it is. How do you hack your way into getting a, how do you help yourself get into a growth mindset the right way? Yeah. So the first step is to take any kind of personality assessment you can get your hands on. Dis, Mark Frigg, something like that. Whatever it is. I don't care. And I've looked like, just like sales methodologies that you and I, John, have studied them all.

And we know that all of them have good things and that we take and some of them, whatever, right? Same thing with personality assessments and selection science. You need to understand yourself first. What's your natural state? Three fourths of who we are is wired into us. Trying to pretend to ignore that or not embrace that is detrimental to you and everybody around you. Okay. Accept it. Be who you are and know that. So based on that, the second thing you do is define a personal vision. And you define a personal vision by understanding what you enjoy. Okay. And I don't mean what's your passion, but what you mean. Because I think this whole find your passion and follow your passion thing is overblown.

I don't think that's as sustainable as finding a meaning. Finding a meaning in life is everything in my view. Your purpose. Your why. Your why, right? Is that like... Correct. Correct. There has to be a higher purpose to what you're doing. Yep. So understanding what that is. So we literally take them through an exercise where they go back to when they're as young as they can remember, the things they enjoyed to do between, say, the ages of five and 10 years old. And they write those things down. And it's a very simple exercise. Then they go into, what do they like to do as a teenager? And then you take the top five things, you put them together, and then you start to analyze what do those things say about who you are and what you enjoy.

Right? I like Legos. Okay. So you like building things, creating things. Wonderful. I like sports. So you like being around other people. You're competitive. You like team environments. Right? I love the outdoors and peace in nature. So you're a deep thinker. Right? You might need a lot of physical activity for your oxygen to hit your brain for you to actually become a good problem solver. Right? Those are the kinds of things that you look at. Then out of that, you define a personal vision where you literally sit down and you do this for yourself. And then if you have a spouse or a partner, you can both do it together, but it's only for you. Five to 10 years from now, if you've gotten everything you want in life, what's the narrative?

Where are you? What are you doing? Who are you with? What do you have if that's what you care about? Okay. Because I used to be a big things person. I spent the first 40 years of my life chasing things. I'm now 46. I'm chasing people now. Because that's me. I'm a big part of who we are as growth X. Our number one core value is people first. I spent enough time beating myself up, working with people and being around people that weren't good for me. Yeah. So now I do the opposite. And then once you define that, you craft a story. And that story is, I'm this kind of person who likes to do this kind of thing in this kind of environment. And therefore, I'm looking for this kind of opportunity. People want to help us.

The problem is, is we don't know how to ask. And we don't know how to do it in a very specific way. And you know, this is a mentor at the academy. We teach people how to hack their career and then craft a story so that when they reach out to John Barrows, who's super busy and super important and on the road all the time, they have a very specific, clear message and ask. Right? No different than when you're building messaging for the top of your funnel and outbound. Okay. Here's who I am. And here's what I'm looking for. And here's why I think you can help me. Right? And then from there, then we have them build a career funnel. And so, you know, as well as I do, everything's a funnel. I learned that in college.

Just kidding. I didn't learn much in college, to be honest with you. No, I drank my way through four years myself. So funnels were a big part of my college experience. Exactly. So the first thing we want to do is create a funnel and we reverse engineer the funnel from the bottom up to create outcomes. So what do we want? We want three job offers from companies that fit our ideal company profile with the kinds of people we want to be with doing the kind of work we want to do. So then we reverse engineer that from the bottom up. So I got three to five, I got three to three job offers. In order to get three job offers, how many interviews do I need to go through? Okay. 10 to 15. In order to get 10 to 15, how many companies do I need to have qualifying conversations with?

Not necessarily pre-screen interviews, but conversations with people in the company. The last thing any of us should ever do is talk to a fucking recruiter. Pardon my French. They're great people. I love them to death. They're in sales too. But they don't make decisions. They do not have the power. They are simply facilitators. We talk to them once we've gotten the right sponsors in the company that say, okay, you now have to follow this ridiculous compliance process. And that means you're going to talk to this person and go through all this shit. Yeah. Okay. That, they're the last ones we talk to. Okay. They are gatekeepers. So once you've had several qualifying conversations with say 25 companies, you can get those 10 interviews.

And in order to get to 25 companies, how many do you need to reach out to? Right? So we do this thing called a career canvas. We take the lean business model canvas. We've adapted it to a career and we have people fill out their own canvas. And it says for these people with this problem in this industry, I can help them in this way. And that's how they craft their story. And now they build out of that. So that's the top half or the left side of the canvas, if you will, the right side, because canvases are product and market. So that's, that's the problem. Now my market is, this is the kind of company I want to work with, with this type of backing and leadership, with this kind of risk profile, because you may love, you may love, um, SAS as, as software as a service, and you're willing to work at anything in SAS, but you also may be want, you may want something that's more stable than a startup.

So you want to go later stage, right? So that's a consideration. You might want to work for your North star. You may want to go to work for, for Elon Musk because he's your North star. And if you work for Elon Musk, great. Um, you may say, um, I recognize that, that, uh, my personal brand is helped by a successful corporate brand. And that often is true. If what we give, we give individual employees way too much credit, especially in the Valley, this whole, I was employee number 40 at box who gives a fuck. Um, you were, I mean, it didn't make you better than somebody who was employee number 400 or, or, or somebody who's working across the street at a company I've never heard of, but we give credit to that.

So you can use that to your advantage. You also, we, we tend to take on too much personal identity when there's failures. Okay. I went to a company that flamed out. It doesn't mean you're a bad person. Um, so you take those sorts of things into consideration. There's many other aspects of it. We don't have enough time here to go through it. People, if they want to listen or watch the talk, they can go to, they can go Google hack your, how to hack your career by Sean Shepard. And you'll find, uh, videos and, and you can go to gxacademy.com and there's content everywhere, uh, on this particular topic. But when people walk themselves through it, the point is, is we tell them that canvas 80 to a hundred companies, just like researching 80 to a hundred accounts, prospects, same deal.

Then out of that, they pick that, they pick the 40 or 50 that they think they want to go after. And then they build an outbound campaign based on an ideal company profile and they begin outreach and it's not, it's a multi-pronged outreach approach. You're not sending cold emails. You're trying to use your network to find people that you can like John Barrows, who knows everybody at Salesforce, because the reason they sell as much as they sell is because of you. So they pick up the phone. So, but that's the point, right? And now you start to have conversations and you take a consultative approach. Why? Because you're a product and that company is a market and your job is to find product market fit, or as we call it on the hack your career side, person company fit.

I don't know if I can help you. I think I can based on what I've learned. I'd love to sit down and have a conversation to see if that is in fact the case. This is not a fricking interview. I'm not talking about my skills and what I want to be when I grow up and all this other shit. It's about what problems do you have? And can I help you solve them? And I swear to you, John, and you've heard this as well. Every hiring manager that has taken an academy grad, regardless of program, through an interview process has said the same thing. Holy shit, what are you teaching these people? Yeah. I've never had an interview like this. I've never had people come in with such thoughtful, deep, understanding questions about everything.

And they've demonstrated to me that they've been thoughtful, that they're not just looking for a job, that they're looking for a career and they were looking for it with me or for me. Make sense? Oh, total sense. I mean, I tell kids all the time, like you, like, you know, kids come up and ask me, John, you know, I'm not happy with where I am right now. And, you know, any suggestions? And I ask them that, which I used to think was stupid when I was a kid, when I would ask, hey, what do you want to be in five years? You know what I mean? Well, I want to be a manager or whatever. But now I actually, I don't know, maybe it's age or experience. Now I actually think that's an extremely important question to answer for yourself.

And I don't mean, to your point, I don't mean like, you know, at that company, where do you want to be in five years? I mean, lifestyle. Like what kind of house, car, lifestyle do you want to be living? What's that vision? And then from there back into what kind of job do you need to have to live that lifestyle? And what kind of money do you need to make to be able to live that lifestyle? And then back into it from there, because I tell them, I go, look, if you're sitting in a job right now that you're unhappy and you don't have a plan and say you're eating a shit sandwich right now, right? Well, if you don't have a plan, you're just going to go look for better taste in shit sandwiches. You know what I mean?

And it's going to be a little bit better. Look prettier. Right. Look prettier, whatever. But if you have a plan, then look, I'll eat a shit sandwich all day long. If that shit sandwich is going to get me to that next point in my career, so that's going to build it to the next. And I will deal with it here. Otherwise, I'm just going to keep bopping around and being slightly less miserable. Yes. That's an absolute formula for success. Do you know why serial entrepreneurs are serial entrepreneurs? Because they fucking win. Why do they win? Because they figured out that formula. Right. And we did it. Look, after selling my last company and partnering with my partners to start GrowthX and launch a venture capital fund, nobody on Sand Hill Road would ever fucking hired me.

I didn't go to some blue blood Harvard or Stanford shit. No. No. No. Ever. I mean, when I'm selling companies, I was selling to people that never would have hired me to work for them in the sales role. Ever. So we did it our own way in the same way we've always done it. So it was, look, we needed to raise a $10 million fund. And we went out and we built a funnel of investors and we worked the funnel until we got where we needed to get. It's everything is a funnel. And you're absolutely right. You have to have an exit strategy. When we invest in a company, we want to know there's an exit strategy because we have to deliver a return to our LPs, to our investors. Right. So I want to know what your exit strategy is.

Because as a venture fund, we've got a three to five, seven tops exit window. Yeah. Right. And so these kids need to have the same kind of thing. And it doesn't have to be five or 10 years out. It's just pick one. Yeah. Timeline, build a milestone for yourself and reverse engineer from the bottom up using that funnel approach and say, look, I want to, I want to, I want to own a home in the next three years. Okay, great. In order to own a home, you need a down payment. How much of a down payment do you need? What kind of home do you want? How much is that going to cost me? Now, how do I make sure I save that money to do that thing? Okay. It's be simple. I want to, I want a nice car or I want to pay off things.

Right. Debt is the worst. I mean, there's good debt and there's bad debt, but, but consumer debt's shit, right? House debt's fine. Yeah. Debt's okay. If it's something that grows in value, it's not okay. If it's just sucking shit out of your bank account. Yeah. Cars suck. Houses are good. Right. I used to make the joke. I love it when one of my sales guys would drive up in a new car. I knew they were motivated. Yeah, exactly. But you pick that vision, you come up with that exit strategy and you say, this is where I want to go. But guess what? We ate shit sandwiches for the first several years, just trying to raise that fund. And we're getting the best deals in the portfolio because we weren't an established venture brand.

But once we established ourselves and once we demonstrated that we added value because we knew how to help our companies sell when most VCs have never sold anything in their life, much less been an operator, that started to attract better deals in our way. Right. And so, but we did, and look, every time I got a door shut in my face, I knew I had a purpose and a plan and I knew if I kept working it, it would happen. Delayed gratification is a wonderful attribute to have, but you have to figure out what that delay looks like. Pick that window. Yep. Yeah. It's, it's, it drives me crazy how many people aren't goal setters. You know what I mean? Like, like literally just write down some fucking goal.

I have a general fear of it because I think it, a lot of us just, we, we, we tend to overthink it. Yep. And then we wrap ourselves around the axle and we get paralyzed from the, you know, paralysis by analysis. And we get locked up and we don't know, um, what to do about it. And then we certainly have a lot of self-doubt. And I would say that in my life, I think the biggest thing that ever held me back was that at any point was self-doubt. Yeah. Nobody else telling me that. It was just me. I have a great friend who's the head of the, of the, of the PTSD and mental health division for the, for the, for the Veterans Administration in Northern California. Dr. John McQuaid. And he's written several books on this topic, but he taught me something very powerful.

And he did this when he came in and talked to the students of the Academy. He said, negative self-talk is the most damaging mental health problem that we have on a daily basis. If just ask yourself when you're down on yourself and you're hard on yourself and you're talking to yourself negatively, would you ever say those things to someone else? Almost never. I mean, unless you're a raging asshole. Yeah, exactly. You have one mean son of a bitch, right? We do it to ourselves every day. And part of having a growth mindset is being mindful and catching yourself in those moments. Those moments when you just had somebody with a bad tone, uh, hang up on you, right? You know, you have no idea what's going on in their life.

Exactly. Um, and, and the time it could be the timing, it could be any number of things. I've learned this over the course of my life, that people don't do what they do, not because of you. They do what they do because of them. And the minute you actually internalize that, recognize it and believe it, you can be at peace with that entire experience. I tell reps like lead with empathy, just lead with empathy, right? You never know. Like somebody could be a raging, like, again, they could yell at you and scream at you. But you know, that morning something happened where their wife or their husband or something, you know what I mean? Like something bad happened to them and they're just, and that's why, for instance, a small nugget here, I tell reps, like when, when a client, like when you have a good engagement with a client and there's some follow-up and next steps and they straight up ghost you, before you send that pissy email, basically saying, what the fuck, where did you go, asshole?

Start your email with, hey, I haven't heard from you a little while. I hope everything's okay. Right? Because too many times in my career, I've sent that, fuck you, asshole, where did you go? And then I've gotten back, sorry, dude, I was in a hospital for the past three weeks with my kid or something like that. It's like, oh my God. Like, and those were like wake up moments for me being like, oh, apparently I'm not the center of the universe here. Maybe I should have some empathy here for what other people may be going. Even that person that you're driving on the street who cuts you off and gives you the finger. And you know what I mean? Like instead of getting road rage and riding up. I wave at them.

Exactly. I wave and smile. Yeah. I mean, I do the opposite, but I, you know, I, but now, you know, I wave and smile. It's the true measure of one's character is not how they act. It's how they react. Yeah. Especially in those moments. And my father taught me this amazing thing that he learned. He was a Navy SEAL era, a Vietnam era Navy SEAL. And he wrote the series of articles on LinkedIn about what the military taught him about the corporate world. And he was a big Silicon Valley, a semiconductor CEO, and he built all the plants around the world for Intel. And he was a major company builder. And it was calmness. Calmness was, was one of the seven attributes that he talked the most about, which was how can, can you be calm under fire?

Right. And if that fire is somebody being a jerk to you, do that. And then the second thing I learned was this thing called, there's this book called difficult conversations, and I recommend everybody read it and internalize it and understand it. It's about how you address impact and not intent with an interaction. Okay. Impact. So say it again. Address impact, not intent. Okay. Okay. When somebody says or does something that upsets you or hurts you or harms you, instead of lashing back out at them in a way that comes at it like they're trying to hurt you, you come at it from, here's what your behavior did to me and talk about it that way. So it creates a disarming environment that helps the other person understand that the impact that they had on that person with that behavior.

Gotcha. So focus on the impact of one's behavior, not the intention of the behavior. You'll find that 90% of the time people are not malicious. They're not trying to harm you, upset you, hurt you, or denigrate you. Something else is going on and they're not aware of it. And so if you address it from an impact standpoint, what you said or did made me feel this way. And I just want you to be aware of that. It's very charming. It's a very powerful way to coach, lead, interact with customers and co-workers, bosses, or those that work for you. It's funny. I have this quick story where I was getting on a plane in Ireland and Aer Lingus is literally one of my least favorite airlines of all time, right?

What's that? Yeah. Well, United, I'm, you know, treat me differently on that one. But I did. So whatever. I was frustrated with the airline all the way through. I was having kind of a rough day anyways. And I was coming home and I remember this woman, she was like, and the stewardess came down and I was sitting in my chair. And you know how like sometimes you sit in the chair and it goes back a little bit and they say, please, you know, before we take off. And I didn't touch it, you know, but it had just moved back. And I said, look, I didn't touch it. I'm like, and it wouldn't go up. And she's like, could you just please make, I go look. And I got pissy with her. I was like, look, oh, fine.

I'll move. And I just moved to the next seat. Right. And I was really just short with her. And she was obviously taken back. She was like, excuse me, sir. I'm just trying to do my job here. Like this is, and I'm like, yeah, whatever. And as soon as I did it, I was like, God damn it. She didn't deserve that. But, but it sat there and it ate at me. Right. And so then all of a sudden she's coming down, the flight takes off and she's coming down with her little trolley and I'm looking at her. I'm like, fuck, here it comes. You know, and now I got to interact with her. Right. I'm like, shit. Um, you know, and, and as she came up, I could tell she was also dreading seeing me as well. Right. And she ended up giving me, like, I was like, I'll have some water or whatever.

And then as she was serving it, I go, look, I just wanted to apologize. I've been having a little bit of a rough day. I, I, I took my frustrations out. I'm, I've, I'm not happy with Aer Lingus right now, but that had nothing to do with you. And I took out my frustrations on you. And I just wanted to say, I'm sorry. And she literally almost broke down crying. She, she, she, she got down, like crouched down. She hugged me and she said, you know what? I've been having a really bad day too. And, you know, and this is why, and I'm not feeling good myself and all that other stuff. And all of a sudden she was just like, I, and I just can't tell you how much I appreciate you actually saying something to break this.

And, and all of a sudden we were talking and chatting. I was getting free drinks the whole time. You know what I mean? Like, and all of a sudden my day flipped around because I took that, like myself out of the whole scenario. And I, and I try to do that with customers who are pissy. I try to do that with prospects and stuff like that. And it just, you know, the disarming factor of, of, of empathy and understanding is an amazing thing. So I think more of us need to practice that a lot more, you know, all, all throughout, you know, on both sides, right? Just to agree. We, we call that in growth X and growth X Academy, we call that hugging elephants in the room. Everybody knows it instead of, you know, attacking it, hug it immediately.

It's it's, it's, it's, it has an amazing, you know, ripping off the bandaid sort of effect. That's a perfect example of hugging, hugging an elephant, you know, and intuit, if you're empathetic, you know, and intuit that that person is upset with something you said or did or vice versa. And you hug that elephant and you do it using that difficult conversations approach. And you say, I'm sorry, right? I apologize. I did something wrong. Obviously it's affecting you or it's affecting me. And I just want to let me know about it. And you talk through it and it has amazing, amazing effects, especially when you start to behave that way over time. Then people will start to tell you the truth. And this is a really important part of today's marketplace.

We always talk about messaging should be designed to do one thing and one thing only, and it is to generate an honest response. When you have a growth mindset and you approach it that way, everything's about finding the truth about, can you solve a problem for somebody? Where does your product fit in the market? If that does it all and what you can do about it, create a functional learning organization out of the group of people responsible for finding that truth and then determining if you can work together through fit, right? Not through selling a product or a service. So, so how do you, let me pinpoint that real quick as far as, cause I think that's one of the hardest things about sales is getting that honest insight from the customer so that we can understand how we can, and I, and I, I kind of, I did a keynote a little while ago and I said, and I put a big chicken and the egg, uh, picture up on the screen.

I said, no, can you, can I help me out here? Could you help me understand what came first chicken or egg? Um, who lied first? Did the, the, the sales rep lie to the customer to the customer to lie to the sales rep? Because somewhere along the line, like we all teach our kids from the minute they're born, like honesty, truth, you know, don't lie all that up. But somewhere along the way, it became completely okay to bold face lie to a sales rep, right? I mean, think about it. You walk into a, you walk into a huge department store, right? You know what you want. You have no fucking idea where it is. And some sales guy comes up and says, Hey, sir, how can I help you today? You know, and all you have to do is say, Hey, I'm looking for this.

Could you point me in the right direction? And they do it. Right. But nine, nine out of 10 people will be like, ah, I'm just looking. And they'll wander around that fucking warehouse for the next 45 minutes. So yeah, here's why I agree with you. And so, and here's the fundamental state of, of, of today's society. People will not tell us the truth if it creates more work or conflict. Right. Okay. Yep. So think about that for a second. Those are the two reasons why we do that in a, in a department store. Yep. So our job as sellers and marketers is to be, is to spend more time trying to create an environment that creates less work and no conflict with more information and value. It does. And that's why, you know what, the way I've started to get there these days, and this is a slight little hack for reps out there thinking about this, is I actually try to disqualify clients way more than I try to qualify them.

Yes, sir. We, and we are all about that at the growth X because, you know, at the seed stage, when we're trying to find out where a product fits in a market, not we, and you only got two or three guys and girls actually working on that in this massive market of thousands of customers, you don't have time for everybody. You need to ruthlessly disqualify people, be ruthless with yourself and your own behavior in how you disqualify. Don't be ruthless to the customer, but you have to come up with a clearly defined framework under which you can determine very quickly if someone is worth continuing to have a conversation with right now. It's not about Mr. Right. It's about Mr. Right Now. Who's a good fit today?

Help me get what I want. So you have to create a disqualification framework, not a qualification framework that's designed exclusively to do that. Because if you do that correctly, the bottom of the funnel speeds up in a hurry. Well, and this is why I think a lot of startups make the mistake and I see them fail is they take money from anybody early stages. Like they'll sell to anybody who will give them money. And what that does is that leads to bad customer service, bad results, all that other stuff. And it's like this this spiral downwards. Yeah. As hard as it is, and I recommend this to any startup is find like honing on that true ICP of where, you know, you can hit a home run and just go find those customers.

And then look, if you want to discount that type of stuff to get them in early, cause you don't have a reputation, fine, but go find them because that's the money you want. And those are the customers that you know, you can add the most value to. And then you start branch branching out from there. But if you take bad money and bad customers, it sucks away resources, bad reputation, and you'll just delete the inevitable. You're going to fail. And the I and ICP at that stage doesn't stand for ideal. It stands for initial. Yeah. Customer profile, which is very different than what your long-term profile is going to be. This is about getting you to stay on the field long enough to learn where your product fits in a market, if it does at all, and what to do about it.

50% of successful startups pivot at least once, a third pivot at least twice. There's no shame in any of that. But you have to be able to go out seeking the truth, learn from that truth, and then through the course of that, determine at a unit level whether or not profitability could exist. Those are the three objectives of the whole GrowthX Market Acceleration Program, our core framework about taking something someplace new, and how we apply it across these three traction milestones that we have to help our companies win. Because 80%, 70% of funded companies at the seed stage fail. And 80% of the reasons they fail have to do with markets and the behaviors of the people running the company. Only two have to do with the product.

We live in the age of applied technology now, John. Companies don't fail because they can't get the product or technology to work. They fail for all the other things that we just talked about. Lack of differentiation in the marketplace, being seduced by everybody who expresses interest in your product regardless of whether or not they're a good fit. Founding teams not getting along well. Misallocation of resources. This whole thing started, we were all angel investors and we invested in the same kind of companies and some of the same companies. We're tired of getting emails that went, we need to raise more money because we weren't able to raise from these people or we're shutting things down because we couldn't raise any more money.

And I'm like, bullshit, you pissed away the money we gave you on stupid stuff. You didn't allocate it in the right way, in the right areas. One of my favorite stories is how Sony was started. And the first, like the guy who, and again, I don't remember names very well at all, but he started in a warehouse and he just got his bunch of friends together and said, hey, let's start a company. And they're like, what are we going to do? He's like, I don't know, we're a bunch of smart people, we'll figure it out. Yeah, that's what Hewlett-Packard did too. Right? Same deal. It took them three years. Sony's first product was like a rice boiler maker thing and it exploded and nothing worked. Their second product was a heating pad.

And that was what, they finally got some traction on the heating pad and they made a few bucks. And so they pivoted, going back to pivoting, they pivoted like 15 times before they became Sony. Right? And so your point, the growth hack mindset, the growth X is- And people first, right? They decided they wanted to work together. They didn't know what they wanted to do, but they wanted to do it together. Fuck, I wish I would have done it that way the first time 25 years ago. Life would have been a lot easier. People that fell in love with products and not people. And now it's the opposite. I'll tell you my, you know, and then we'll wrap up here, but you know, my, I was super fortunate at a very young age to somehow stumble across some friends who I just wanted to work with, who had started a company and we didn't profile.

We didn't go through this strategic thing. We just wanted good people to work with us. And we ended up creating this company that ended up being the fastest growing in Massachusetts, gotten selling off to Staples and all that other stuff. But it wasn't because we were the smartest kids out there. We worked our asses off, but we all gave a shit and, and we kept iterating and pushing each other for, for, to, to evolve and all knew that we didn't have the answers. So we were just like, shit, let's keep trying shit out here. And let's, you know, where it breaks, it breaks, where it doesn't, it doesn't. We'll keep doubling down on the stuff that does. So that's the Jim Collins philosophy and his research in his books, right?

It's about core team. If you're going to build something that's lasting, you've got to have a core team that does those kinds of behaviors. They, they will beat the shit out of each other. It's more like, it's like family, like me and my brother, 15 months apart, beat the crap out of each other growing up, but nobody was ever allowed to touch him. Yep. That's exactly it. Yeah. Right. So Sean, look, I, we didn't even, man, we didn't even get to what we were supposed to talk about this lasting mover advantage, but I think this is part one of at least a two, three part series here on podcast. So, um, all day you and I, it's disgusting. It's awesome. But, uh, let's do this. I do want to, I do want to hit on the next stage because we talked about growth hacks, your career, how you should look at things now building a business, correct?

Cause a lot of the audience really, I think has aspirations here to start their own thing. And let's talk about that lasting mover advantage, but let's wrap things up here. How can people find more stuff about you? Um, you know, where, where should they go to, to learn more about growth X and you and everything else that you're doing right now? Sure. Then go to growth X.com, uh, for the parent company, uh, GX academy.com for, uh, for, uh, for the sales Academy. Um, and, uh, obviously on Twitter, I'm at Sean a shepherd, um, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, uh, everything. So feel free to, uh, to shoot me a note. Awesome. Sean. Well, look, let's, uh, let's do this again soon. I'm going to send you that link to my counter cause I want to keep this conversation going and, uh, maybe we'll tease it out maybe a few weeks here so that we, so they don't go back to back, but, uh, let's keep this conversation going.

Cause I love what you're doing. You and I have a very similar mindset on what it takes to be successful. And again, coming back from, from backgrounds where we're not the smartest kids in the room, I think gives us an advantage these days. Cause, uh, you ever think I always go to Jack Welch, right? If you think you're the smartest kid in the room, something's wrong, right? Yeah. Leave the room. Yeah. Leave the room. Go find some other people. Exactly. Unless that, unless that room's a bar and that's a, well, there you go. That's a totally different story. Go back to the funnel, right? So thanks brother. This was awesome. Have a good while. I'll talk to you soon. All right, everybody. Thank you again so much.

Hopefully you got some value out of this one. And as I say, every time go make somebody happy today, go make somebody smile. There's too much negativity in this world. And no matter how bad your day goes, if you can put a smile on somebody's face, you know, you've done a good job. So let's, uh, let's all have some fun out there and make it happen. All right. Thanks everybody.