216: Sean Sheppard On Adopting A Growth Mindset

What is poppin', y'all? It's your man, James Say What Sales Buckley, and we are back with your latest episode of Make It Happen Mondays with your host, John Barrows. Big shout out to our partners, Sales Loft, Vidyard, Proposify, Rise, and our latest partner, Chili Piper. Happy to have you here. These are great teams to work with, very valuable tools and services, so check them out today. Today, we're going to welcome our longtime friend, Sean Shepard, managing partner at U+. This man is a serial entrepreneur with three successful exits in his rearview mirror. When the pandemic hit, Sean saw a new opportunity, and today he's helping corporations start their own startups. This is going to get interesting fast.

Before we kick it off, there's a few things I want to bring to you. Continuous learning has come into the frame and become a primary need for sales teams of all sizes. Leaders everywhere have been forced to design their own learning systems for their sales teams so that they can keep learning and developing new strategies and skills that drive revenue. They've been leveraging JBSales on Demand to create millions in pipeline and deliver the skill sets needed to earn opportunities and close them more often. Today, I want you to check it out at ondemand.jbarrows.com to become a member and invest in yourself. Learn about prospecting skills like video and cold calling and great email structure. Learn about social selling all the way up to customer success, as well as things like identifying your ICP and knowing the personas that you sell to.

This is a wealth of knowledge. Become the well-rounded sales professional that you deserve to be with JB Sales On Demand. That URL, again, is ondemand.jbarrows.com. Let's hop in to this great conversation with Sean and JB. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to Make It Happen Mondays. Hopefully, you all had a fantastic weekend. I am in the middle of demo of my whole house right now, so I'm living in the basement, which is not fantastic, but hopefully the outcome is going to be worth it. Regardless, I am sitting with a repeat guest here on Make It Happen Mondays and a good friend of mine, Sean Shepard, managing partner of Uplus. How are you doing, my friend? I'm good, Johnny. How are you doing?

I cannot complain, man. We were just talking right before we got on this. It could be a lot worse. Let's put it that way. I count my blessings every day. Even though I'm in the basement, I actually got a pretty decent setup here. My wife is the one who's on the second floor dealing with all this, because literally today is demo day. They're ripping down the walls. They're ripping everything out, so she's trying to do work right next to all that. I'm at least tucked in the basement, so I'm in pretty good shape. You're looking always outside, nice and warm, and you're moving too, right? Yeah. Montana for the summers. We're really excited about it. We're going to be empty nesters come May, so we've got the ability to do this.

Obviously, with what's been going on in the world, I don't have to be in Silicon Valley every day. That's one of the blessings of this whole thing, man, is the non-travel and the acceptance of remote to me. It was always there, but now that it's just normal, I hope it stays like this. I think where travel is much more selective, right? Where it's like, okay, yes, there is that one big meeting. There is that one big thing that I do, but 90% of the time, I can just kind of light up a camera like this and have a good conversation overseas or whatever. Yeah. No, I completely agree. Just the high value travel, I think, was what we'll see later. It's much more strategic and intentional. Yeah. So talk to us, because look, we've had a long journey here.

How long have we known each other now? Like five, six years, something like that? Longer than that. I think it's going on 10, but... Yeah. Time does fly a little bit. Going back to your kid, empty nesters, like my daughter's 10 now and I'm like, shit. Like really? Yeah. Because actually, you know what? It's been, it's been 10 years because I don't think we knew each other before I had my kid. So I think... Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So yeah. So talk to me about what you're working on now. Cause I know you got the, you know, you plus, you know, you've had a real long career in the investment space and startups and VCs and all that other stuff. So talk to us, cause I, this is going to frame the conversation for everybody out there.

We're going to be talking about risk and the role it plays in the sales process. And Sean comes with a very interesting perspective based on all the different things that he sees. So give us a little context here, Sean, before we dive into it. Yeah. Just quick background, 25 years, serial tech entrepreneur, sales founder, co-founder, right? Always have been. I've started five companies. I've sold three. I built one of the largest online startup accelerators in GrowthX, built an academy to teach people how to sell and market and design in the startup world called GrowthX Academy. Started getting into, getting pulled into corporate innovation work along the way. And then the pandemic hit and I saw a real opportunity to help every company whose number one priority now is digital transformation.

Um, and, uh, took a 50% stake in a, in a, in a large company called a user technologies or what we call you plus for short, which is a corporate venture builder and innovation studio for large corporations. So we help companies build startups. Um, and we take it from idea all the way to scalable revenue. We've launched over 80 digital businesses and created north of a billion dollars in market value for clients in over 30 countries. So startups within corporate, right? So you're a big company and you have an idea. You think you, it's almost like an incubator for that company though. And you help them figure out what that idea is and see if it runs. Yeah. And there's been a fundamental shift, uh, and sort of a convergence of two things in, in recent years, corporates that have been playing in the innovation space, trying to work in the startup ecosystems, aren't getting the returns they were looking for whether it's through investing or it's through partnering, uh, with these startups.

Um, and there's a lot of reasons for that. Startups don't know how to work with big corporations, big corporations don't know how to work with startups. Um, there's a lot of points of failure there. Um, failure rates that are higher than corporations like to accept. Um, so they're looking more inward now and saying, look, we have the ecosystem. We own the customers. We own the relationships, the use cases and the insights around our industry. Let's leverage our existing assets and start building these products instead of just partnering with startups. But the challenge that exists is, is that they don't have the right mindset, skillset, or execution framework to do it with their internal teams because they're all focused on the core business.

Um, and so we bring full non-dilutive co-founding startup teams to the table. Okay. Let's develop a, what I call it, we're calling it a portfolio based approach towards venture building. So I take my venture capital hat, you know, having been a part of three funds and invested in over 140 companies, um, and helping those companies find product market fit. And so we've taken that perspective in that model and said, um, we'll come in and we will provide the teams to help you develop that portfolio of ideas, prioritize what you should work on based on traction, uh, opportunities in the market, and then start testing and validating, and then ultimately building and commercializing those, those businesses for them and then handing them back off into the organization in an intelligent way.

Interesting. So, cause I, man, I got, I don't know we're going to talk about risk, but I got a lot of questions around that because I, I, most huge corporations are just, they're not, they're not built to, to be agile, if you will. And that is an agile approach, right? I remember when my little company, you know, 10 million dollar thrive networks got bought by staples conceptually, it made all the sense in the world, right? As far as they had the client base, we had a scalable model. They weren't in technology and ours, but I mean, when I took my little 50 person company and brought it into staples, when I tell you, we slammed into the corporate bureaucracy, just, just everything moved a thousand times slower and it ultimately failed hard.

And, and I look at companies, you know, it's rare that a huge organization is nimble enough or is able to even carve out because the mentality is so different from a big organization to a startup. So do you literally separate, you bring in your own, like, you know, directors and all that other stuff as a pure separate entity and allow them, does the company allow them to kind of have the autonomy that they need to get that thing going? They have to, we need to have a safe space to learn quickly, cheaply and quietly where a product fits in the market. If it does it all and what to do about it, we have to teach them how to learn fast. And then we have to do it in a way that shows a predictable, scalable, profitable path towards revenue.

Because as I've always said in the startup world, it's about three things, truth, learning, and profitability. Um, and, and finding the truth, uh, learning quickly about how you can adapt to the needs of the, of the market, the consumer, the customer, the user, um, to find profitability is what it's all about. So we embed that team in and we usually have a, you know, you have your corporate stakeholders who sponsor the projects. Uh, you have a business line owner and you have a product owner, um, inside the organization that we partner with. And then they are held accountable to the effort and give us access to the resources we need to be able to leverage the organization and their ecosystem to execute.

And then we have a full learning framework and an execution framework that allows us to find this, find that truth, um, and get to profitability as quickly as we can. Interesting. So, and I think it leads well to the conversation about risk because I guess if I'm a huge organization, that's, this seems there's risk on either side is if I don't become more nimble and try out new things, then I'm going to probably be a dinosaur and lose ultimately. But if I do hand over, I mean, I've got to imagine they got to carve off a pretty significant budget for this resources, everything. So there's risk there if it fails. So, so let's talk about risk and, and how you see risk has changed, especially with COVID right now.

Right. Cause I think risk has always been something that we have to address in the sales process. We have to evaluate, we have to address it. Right. And, and, you know, as far as priorities, risk, all these different things. If you talk to a CFO, it's, it's more risk oriented. If you talk to CEOs, it's more growth oriented type of stuff. But how have you seen risk change, um, in the evaluation process over the course of the past year and a half, as it relates to COVID and what just happened? Yeah, I think it's changed in the risk dynamic has changed in terms of what the top, what the riskiest areas are right now. We used to view because our core businesses were so sound and predictable, um, risk was changed to that core business.

Now risk is in the market. Um, and risk is in not changing. Um, and so I think that dynamic is flipped and that's why you're seeing things like business model innovation, uh, bringing digital to a physical world, trying to take old economy businesses and turn them into new economy businesses, trying to create more value from the information on your commodity than you can actually create with the commodity itself. Those kinds of conversations and, and, and, um, uh, uh, decisions are being weighed heavily in the C suites now. Um, and, and rightfully so you talk about the rate and pace of change in the market, right? You talked about being a dinosaur. Um, here's an interesting statistic, 52% of S and P 500 companies in the year 2000, no longer exist.

Holy shit. Um, yes. In the sixties, the average length of time, average tenure on the S and P 500 was 75 years. Today it's 14. Um, so if you're not adapting to the users, if you're not creating an Amazon like experience for your customers, whether they're B2B or B2C, it doesn't really matter. That's now the expected experience. And if you don't know how to bring that to the table, not just for your customers, but also for your employees, there's a big conversation now going on around connecting EX and CX and nobody's done it well at scale yet in terms of vendors and providers, especially in the SaaS space, there's conversations going on around it. But I talked to CX leaders all the time. We were heavily involved in the innovation process, uh, and in the innovation agenda overall.

Um, and if you believe the Richard Branson thing, that if you take care of your employees, they will take care of your customers and that will therefore take care of your shareholders. You need to create this amazing employee experience connected to that consumer and customer experience in a way that drives that shareholder value. I see. I think that, so Dave Cancel, I had him on recently. It was a fascinating conversation. I love him over a drift, you know, and he said that I agree with him that everything is commoditized except for the experience. The experience is the one thing that is not commoditized and it's one thing you can control. Right. And I love the take on the, the, the employee experience because what this dovetails to is the now, I think we went from when, when COVID hit, it went to a, a buyer's market in the sense that so many people got laid off.

There was so much flood in the marketplace that employers could now kind of pick and choose who they wanted to and whatever it was. And so employees were like, give me a job, give me a job. I think relatively recently that's flipped over. And now employees, now that we're all remote and we don't have as much ties to the organization and we're not sitting there looking at you, walking down the hall and, you know, grabbing lunch with somebody, the flight risk of an employee right now is exponentially higher than it used to because they're getting poached. Right. So all the recruiters are coming after the top performers. And if that, that, that employees experience with the organization is subpar, they'll, they're a bigger flight risk now than ever.

Well, and that's one of the primary reasons. I would say the other primary reason is everybody is rethinking everything at the individual and family level. Oh, that's true. We're all reevaluating what our lives should look like based on this experience, right? Whether we have direct relationships with people who've died from this, or we feel like we're at risk for it. Um, the entire world has changed how we work, how we act, where we go. Um, all of our behaviors are, are, are, are changing. So everybody's had a lot of time in the last year to reevaluate their lives. And so some of it certainly is that employee experience or, but others, another key part of it is like, what do I want my life to be like now?

Because I've, I've stared death in the face. I've seen this massive change. I've, you know, you have, once you have that relationship with that level of, of, of shock, um, you start to reevaluate and re kind of take stock of everything in your life. I'm seeing a lot of that. I'm hearing a lot of those conversations. I'm not saying that it's the most important thing, but I am hearing from a lot of salespeople, a lot of just people in corporate America and globally, frankly, that they're all going through this evaluation process and they're making changes for all sorts of reasons. Yeah. Well, I know I have. I've reevaluated everything as far as goals, plans, what I want out of life. I mean, the fact that I get to get up every morning, take my daughter to school every single day and then have dinner with her every single night to me is worth five X what I'm making right now.

Right. You and I both were on the road 80% of the time before. It's awful. Um, and nothing has been better for my family life and for my marriage than being home. I thought I was going to drive her crazy, but we had the same concern, right? We always told people that the reason our relationship is so healthy is because we never see each other. Right. So when we do the same thing, yeah. And I was like, we were both a little nervous. We're like, well, shit, if we were both in the same house for a long time, then we're probably going to fucking hate each other and get divorced within a year. And yeah, shit happened. It actually worked out. So we actually do like each other in general, but it's amazing what, what, uh, and it sounds kind of, um, funny, but, um, they may be even geopolitical, but, um, it's amazing how close people can become when they have a common enemy.

I'm an enemy right now is this pandemic, right? And the change that comes with it and the fear of it, you know, all those things that go with it. Um, and so you start to figure out, let's just say what's important in life becomes more clear. Absolutely. So let's talk about risk as it relates to assessing it when, you know, cause let's bring this down to sales reps here. Um, you know, it's always to try to figure out where, first of all, understand what the risk is, but also the tolerance for risk. Right. And, and let's kind of talk, let's go from top down here. Um, you know, at the executive level, you said exactly all executives are looking at risk differently, right? It used to be risky to make a change when something was working.

Now it's risky not to make a change, but I still see that there's a lot of businesses out there that are waiting for things to go back to normal. And, and I tell, and I, every time I hear that, I'm like, you're already dead. You're already, you're already a dinosaur. You're you're, you've already lost with that mentality. So say you're selling to an organization and you have the opportunity to engage at the C-suite, right? And, and we can break it down by the role if, if we want to, but how do we assess or how do we assess and address risk at, at, to see if like, how risky are they in making a change or, you know, how risk tolerant are they? Like, what are some tools that you can give us to, to really dig to the core of that risk factor for the organization and are they willing to make this change?

Yeah. I actually want to take a step back and, and, and, and talk about the fundamentals of it and why I thought this was the topic we should talk about because, um, I have been observing more and more and more, um, now that in my, in my, at this stage in my life where I've got the ability to see the forest through the trees, right. And, and, and get above, uh, out of the weeds and, and just observe behaviors. Um, and it dawned on me in a, in a, in a chat I was having with Andy Paul, the great Andy Paul, um, about how sales professionals don't, um, acknowledge or recognize or prioritize risk when it comes to understanding how their buyers make decisions. And I think that's inherent, it's an inherent thing in the nature of a sales professional, right?

I think inherently sales professionals are more risky than most people. We take risks every day. Every time we pick up the phone, we risk our person, we risk our, our state of mind. We risk our, our, uh, our reputation. We risk our, um, uh, you know, we, our, our personal identity. We risk rejection, you know, we risk all sorts of things. Um, and so we don't view risk the same way that others do. I think we're, we are risk takers. Well, just fundamentally based on commission alone, you know, all you got to do is look at commission, like base salary. Everybody's comfortable when you put commission in there's inherent risk that you're not going to hit your number, not going to pay your bills. So it's a driver to keep going.

That is inherently more risky than a stable, quote unquote job. That's right. And guys and girls like us see that, that plan and get excited and prefer that over the bigger base because we see the opportunity of getting the bigger upside, right? We, we see the reward. We don't see the risk. Um, and so because of that, I think we overlook and don't, um, uh, emphasize the importance of risk in the decision-making process for our buyers, because they are very different. Um, the, the, the inherently they are in a role where they have to manage risk and the higher you go in an organization, the greater risk is a factor in everything that they do. Just read a 10 K. Um, just watch a CEO interview. Um, and every word, they, you know, everything is about managing risk.

And so what we need to do, uh, as salespeople is better understand what risk is, um, how the role it plays in the decision-making process, and then put some, uh, a process in place to uncover that risk, acknowledge it, have an open discussion around it so that you and your parties both understand it and then figure out ways to de-risk said risk. Um, because I believe it's my assessment in doing a lot of closed loss analyses that that is one of the primary reasons we lose deals at the bottom of the funnel. Um, and this is an address risk. Yeah. Cause we didn't address risk because here's the reality of today. Right. And you probably heard me say this before. We've probably had this conversation, right?

People won't tell you the truth. If it creates conflict, it's your responsibility, um, to identify what I call create a risk profile for each by each decision maker, um, in the process, uh, and then create a safe space to where you can run a conversation with those decision makers around risk. What are the risk factors? Call them out, make them real, put labels on them, measure them together, and then together formulate a plan that shows, uh, how this, how this decision will be de-risked over time to create what every basic human needs, which is certainty, because risk is just at the end of the day, not knowing what the outcome is going to be. Um, and so you've got to create an environment where you can turn uncertainty into some measure of, of, of certainty.

So, so how do I do it? I start, I got like a five-step process, right? Number one is I hug the elephant. It's one of my favorite managerial leadership philosophies. There's an elephant in every room. Um, when you're going through the sales process and the one elephant might be, I don't know if I have a need. Another elephant might be, um, I'm happy with my current vendor. Um, uh, another one might be, um, I don't see a compelling reason to change, but in this instance, the elephant is risk. And so you've got to hug that risk elephant. Um, and then you need to start showing a path to how you can remove the barriers to change. Cause the number one, um, the number one reason people don't want to change is they see all the barriers associated with it.

Cause again, we're not competing with some other vendor. We're competing with change. Status quo. Yeah, exactly. Or the lack of willingness to change. Then we have to define all those risk reduction measures, right? How are the, how are we going to reduce, reduce the risk here? Um, and I'll give you a good example. So you plus one of our value propositions is de-risking, um, investments in building, uh, in innovation, right? So how do we do that? Well, we don't build anything until the customers told us what, what they want and what they're willing to pay for it. So thereby we can reduce the costs associated with any idea by running them through a framework that gets, uh, us to test and validate in the market, um, what the value proposition is, what the business model is, who the customer is, what the use case is, and how we're going to measure value before we build anything.

Right. And that's, that dramatically de-risks it. It also enables them once they learn the right mindset to actually kill something before they invest too much in it. Right. So we show them that path. Um, and that's an example of how you define risk reduction measures. And then you need to share success stories about how you de-risk deals for other people. Yeah. Right. Nothing is better than word of mouth, right. Or, um, um, uh, successful user stories. And then out of that, you've got to turn that uncertainty into as much certainty as you can and gain mutual agreement on it. And we do that through what we call a value creation model, right? You start by gaining mutual agreement on the value that could be created by working together and how that gets measured and what it looks like.

And then you dive into the risk profiles for each of your buyer, uh, your, your, your decision-making profiles. So your CFO has got a different risk profile than your, than your CIO and your CEO has got a different one than that. And then, you know, your, your, your head of sales has got this one and your head of marketing has got that one. They all view risk differently and they all measure it differently. And you have to have that conversation with them to understand what that is. Now you can do a lot of this research on your own in advance, right? We've talked about this before too. The internet has given us the ability to learn so much about our customers before we engage them that we can start to form up a hypothesis of what a risk profile looks like so that we can start that conversation and say, based on my research, I understand these are the risk, the biggest risk factors in your work.

Do you agree? If not, tell me. Okay. Cause I was going to say, how do you, how do you even strike up that conversation to uncover risk? And to your point, hug the elephant, right? Inherently risk is in every, at some level for everybody, but like literally calling it out. And, and do you call it out as these are the risk factors for your business as I see them, or do you call it out? And I know there's risk in you even thinking about making this decision here. So let's, let's have this conversation of where you are on that level. Like which, which approach do you use? Both of those, both of those work. And I would say it depends on the level of credibility you already have and the, and the depth of the relationship.

So the latter is the answer is the right approach when you don't have that relationship or credibility and the former is the right approach if you do. Okay. But the whole idea, once again, and we've talked about this many times is, is that you've got to create a safe space for people to tell you the truth, which means you'd have to view this as I'm looking for feedback. Help me help you. The Jerry Maguire moment, right? Yeah. Help me help you. I am not afraid to, to, to hear how you view risk and change. Um, and what that, and, and what, what bothers you and what scares you. The words are important. As I said, people don't want to show vulnerability, um, or create conflicts. So they won't tell you the truth if you position it that way.

So how you position it is really, really important. So another way is to say, I have this same conversation with all of our successful clients. Um, and people in your industry and in your role that I've worked with view risk in this way. What, what are your thoughts? How do you view risk? Gotcha. What role is that playing in your decisions? Um, and, uh, and then create that profile together and just have that conversation and hug that elephant because the sooner you can do that, which is after value creation, uh, middle of the funnel, right. Um, middle of the funnels where you have this conversation, this is not a top of the funnel conversation. Um, you've got to demonstrate value and capability and, and have, uh, those conversations around solution designing or proposals, you know, post demo, et cetera.

And then once you do, this is all part of what Neil Racken would call in spin selling resolution of concerns phase, right. Um, and you've got to uncover those concerns, acknowledge them and address them individually and, and give them the weight that your client gives them. If your client thinks something is super risky, it's super risky. It's about truth learning and profitability. I think that quote is probably going to stick with you for a long time. There's always risks, but even the risk dynamic has changed recently. The risk used to be change, but now I think that the risk is not changing just like Sean pointed out. That's certainly a big aha moment for me. Here's a bit about what's popping at JB sales lately.

We want to hear from you. So reach out at jamesatjbarrows.com to share your sales story and be featured on next week's show today. I want to tip my hat to Emma, an on-demand user that was sending 540 word emails to her prospects. And then after joining JB sales was able to shrink those emails down to around 120 words. She's already seeing a tremendous difference in her reply rates way to go. Emma change brings progress. There's no doubt about that. JB sales on demand was designed so that you control your skill level. Our dynamic search function will allow you to customize the next learning path that you'd like to take. Focus on your cold calling, your prospecting videos, even writing proposals with our friends at Proposify, all baked into one learning experience that will help you sell better.

Join us today at on-demand.jbarrows.com. Now let's throw it back to Sean and John to see what happens next. It's funny. It's funny you bring it up. Like, so my mom, I was literally right before we got on this call, I was talking to my mom. She called me up. My dad unfortunately passed a few months ago. She's now moving everything. She's selling her house and doing all this other stuff. She does this plan and she had this plan in place and she came to me. She's like, well, I'm adjusting my plan because I feel more comfortable doing this and all this other stuff. And she's like, what do you think? I go, mom, I go, your risk profile is so drastically different than mine. Like drastically. Like she thinks flying because she's going to move out to California with my sister.

And she's like the stress of, of just taking one flight to California to her is like this whole day thing. She has to get in the right mindset. She doesn't want anybody sleeping over the night before because she'll freak out and she doesn't want to have to. And I'm like, I'll, I'll get, I'll go to the airport right now and get on a plane to California and have 57 things done by the time I land. So I go, mom, like, don't like, what level of comfort do you have? What's going to make you most comfortable? And she's like, well, this, I go, then do that. I go, don't ask me my opinion of what you should do because my profile is so drastically different. And I think that's the, that's the thing. And, and I, you know, tie it back to when, when you said that it's, this is the middle of funnel conversation.

This is like, it kind of leads into this, this trend I've seen, or, or it's worked for us too, is instead of the top down approach to sales and going in at the executive and saying, Hey, I got this great solution. Look, that's all well and good in a, in a growth economy, right? Cause your risk profile is much less. It's, it's, it's, you're willing to take way more risks when the, the, when the economy's going good and everything's going, but as soon as the economy retracts, all of a sudden risk becomes it, right? So the bottom up approach, which is learning from the individuals within the organization, gathering insights and all that other stuff. And then when you have that executive, you come with an opinion about based on what you think you've seen so far, you asked to validate and then you layer on, okay, so how risky is this for you personally?

Right? I get a sense of your organization. It's risky not to do something here, but you're the one who's going to be holding the bag for this. So where, what level are you at as it relates to this decision? Yes. Yes. You have to create an environment where you literally say, I've got your back. I know this is risky. Most salespeople avoid this conversation because they either don't know it needs to happen or they're afraid of the answer. Well, it also, and, and nothing is, nothing creates more credibility for you than, than being completely honest about the risks associated with doing business with me. Okay. I understand those risks. I deal with them every day. Let's have that conversation. And the higher you go up to the food chain, the more of those conversations are happening without you in the room anyway.

And you need to know that they're happening. Before COVID, I was in boardrooms all day. Right? And, and, and, uh, and now I'm in zoom boardrooms. It's the same stuff. They're both boring. Risk is a part of every conversation with every single decision. What are the risk factors? What happens if this thing goes sideways? Um, what are the possible scenarios in which it might go sideways? Let's talk through all of those things because I want you to know that I've got your back. People aren't looking for vendors. They're looking for partners. They're looking for people to tell them things they've never heard, show them things they've never seen, teach them things they've never been taught, right?

Experience things they've never experienced. And when you have the courage, uh, and the conviction to know that again, no is the second best answer in sales and it's not a fit, then, then you can, uh, you, it's easier to, um, uh, to, to put this into action and then there's incredible respect and credibility with your, with, with, with your end customer. Yeah. This is kind of like why, like, I'm B I've been beating this drum for a while. I don't know when it happened, but a while back I, I stopped trying to qualify people and I started to try to disqualify people. Yes. Right. I, so I, I ask you all the questions of why you shouldn't do business with me because you're going to figure those out eventually.

And I might as well bring them up, right? Oh, you're looking for like, you know, perfectly, you know, tactically on my end, you know, when people start talking about methodologies, I'm like, could you help me understand what you, what your definition of methodology is? Because I'm going to tell you right now, if you are looking for a holistic end to end soup to nuts, top down methodology, we should stop the conversation right now. Cause that I am not methodology. I don't believe in methodologies or any of that stuff. So help me understand what you mean by methodology. Cause I might not be your guy with that. And all the, and then, well, not really. Cause cause then I'll frame it. I'll say, well, do you mean like methodology or do you mean like structure that can, you know, give you like a common language type of thing?

And they'll usually, Oh no, no, no, no, no. Structure to common language. Oh, okay, cool. And even just that alone starts getting people's, Oh, okay. Well, he's not like a typical sales rep. Who's going to say yes to everything and we can do everything and Oh, no problem. And we got the perfect solution for that. I'm going to tell you, no, here's where I'm good at here. Actually fuck that. Here's where I'm great. Okay. I tell people this all the time. I go, look, this is where we are great. This is where we're good. And this is where we kind of suck. So if you're in my job here in this conversation is to figure out if you need what I'm great at. And if that's the case, then I'm going to do challenger sale all day long.

Then I'm going to push you to do this decision because it is the right thing. And I am the right fit, but if it's good, you might want to start looking at other options. If it's shit, I'm just going to walk away immediately. And that's how you become a trusted partner. Yeah. That's exactly how you do it. Yeah. I, I, I, it always kills me. Where do you think the mentality comes from sales reps of why they think they have to tell, like, this goes back to like the slide deck, every sales reps, you know, presents every fucking piece of their demo, every goddamn slide on their slide deck. They start with their history, their background, the awards that they get and all that other shit. What is that a, is that a lack of educate?

Is that a leadership thing? Is that a perception thing? Like why I still get questions when I talk to prospects, the reason they're doing training is because they really want to kind of shift to a solution sale as opposed to a, you know, show up and throw up sale. I'm like, hold on Xerox created solution selling back in 1980, fucking whatever it is. And you're still, your reps are still showing up and throwing up and product dumping on people 30, you know, 40 years later, like where have you been? So why do you think we're still stuck in this? And I'm not going to say it probably 75, 80% of companies that I work with still think, look at all the shit that we do and how awesome it is. Why is that?

Well, I mean, it's human behavior. People are sheep. I mean, they're doing what everybody else has always done and it's easy to, it's, they understand that, right? They know they're comfortable with it. Um, but it's not the right way to do it. Um, at all. Um, you know, and I'm completely 100% in agreement with you that, um, I'm starting to, I've shifted my thinking entirely to a bottom, bottom of the funnel up approach as opposed to a top down, uh, design thinking, right? Exactly. Using a design thinking approach, uh, to try and find customers who are the right fit for me, not just the other way around. So the way that I tell my story is I always start with, um, uh, why we exist, right? We exist because most innovations fail and they fail because of people and markets, not because of products and technology.

Um, and we are people and markets people, um, know how to solve that problem. Um, and, and it's something Seth Godin taught me many years ago. He's like, when you're marketing, there's two kinds of people in the world. Those who share your worldview and those who don't, you know, seek out the ones that share your worldview and tell them the truth and the other ones will nurture themselves away. So being very open about, um, what you care about, why you exist, what's going on, what's the shift going on in the marketplace right now, that's creating the opportunity for us to work together, uh, and how we're going to solve things together and what that journey looks like. Um, it's a much better conversation to have.

Um, and I've always been, you know, you've heard me a million times. The last thing you do is demo. And once you, and when you demo, you demo, you demo based on what you've heard. Um, you know, if this is a problem, let me show you how I solve that problem. Okay. And then, yeah, if they want to see everything else, they'll ask you. Sure. But otherwise stay focused on the key issues that your, your customer has. If you've done the questioning framework correctly, um, has, has told you exist with the way they currently do business and the impact, uh, of, of those problems from the way they do business and what the resulting need might be. And then use that to weave your narrative. I think the problem is, is how do you scale that?

You know, you know, it's easy to scale. Yeah, I agree. I think that's a big part of why people don't rely on process and methodology. Right. Cause I can train you on a slide deck. I can train you how to deliver a full pitch deck and whatever. Um, and look, I always train somebody on business and market acumen. You can train them on, uh, uh, emotional quotient and emotional intelligence. You can train them on critical thinking and listening and storytelling and narratives, all things that, um, that, you know, were never considered part of this structured industrial based sales approach that was created by the Xeroxes and the NCRs and all those guys. You go back to the history of sales in this country, it all was born on scale.

Well, it's also our education. As soon as we got to an industrial revolution where we could stamp out the same widget time and time again, that meant now that we needed to stamp out people to sell those widgets time and time again in the same way. And that's ancient thinking. Well, it's the same. It's the, I mean, and you know this more than I do. It's the same thing with the education system in general. Oh yeah. We teach to the test. We don't teach creativity. We don't teach, you know, we don't teach critical thinking, which is why like I put my daughter in, in a Montessori school, right? Because it's the exact opposite of these traditional, you know, way of, of thinking. It's experiential learning.

I said to, I said to my daughter, well, I didn't say this to my daughter. I said to my wife. I don't want to let her know. I don't know. It was like, I could care less if my daughter could pass a fucking math test. You know why? Because she could, you know, I don't know, you know, when you and I were kids, you remember our teachers always telling us, oh, well, you need to learn math because you're not, it's not like in the future, you're going to be walking around with a calculator in your pocket. Well, guess what, bitch? So I am right. So, you know, Hey Siri, what's the square root of 8 billion and 75? Oh, I got an answer there. So, but critical thinking, that's what I think is, but, but how do you, I mean, outside of like Montessori young age embedding that, how do you take a kid that's come out of a structured learning environment in college taught to the MCAS to GMAT, whatever it is?

And now how in the world do you teach? I mean, there's a big conversation here, but how I've always like, I'm always curious about how do you, how do you teach genuine curiosity? And I don't think you can, how do you treat, teach critical thinking? Uh, business acumen is, is the easier one out of, out of the three right there, but those three pieces, business acumen, critical thinking, and, um, whatever the hell the other one was, those are the three ones that I think are absolutely curiosity. Yeah. Yeah. Curiosity for success. So here's how I do it. Right. And we did this at growth X Academy with the entire way we designed our curriculum. It starts with growth mindset, right? Carol Dweck from Stanford wrote the book growth mindset after, uh, uh, after doing years and years and years of early childhood development, um, studies to try and understand what changes because, um, when we're little, right, before we get into these structured societal frameworks, where the only thing you have in common in a classroom is your age and your location.

Um, we, we become stifled, um, because we're told no 17 times more than we're told yes, by the time we're 18 years old. Um, we, we, um, we stop, we start, uh, we start being afraid of making mistakes so that we're not open to learning new ideas. You don't see that when you're learning how to walk. I've never seen a headline that says kids said, fuck it, I'm done. They all learn it, right? Eventually. Yeah. So it begins with a learn it all mindset instead of a know it all mindset. And if you're open to learning and feedback and you apply a growth mindset and you can put that in action immediately, I mean, I've got a workshop we've been doing for years at the Academy and, and, and, um, and with our innovation clients on growth mindset, where you can absolutely find out in five minutes, whether you have a fixed mindset or you have a growth mindset.

And then once you figure that out, you can actually do some very simple things to change your mindset and change your approach and then test them in real time and see the results instantly. And then that builds confidence for you to take a growth mindset based action next time. So once you have that foundation of a growth mindset, I do believe you can, you can, uh, develop, I wouldn't say teach, but you can develop curiosity. You can develop more grit, but you can learn that creates the foundation for learning how to learn in accelerated fashion. And the first principle of accelerated learning is direct experience. And you nailed it with experiential. That's what I fear right now. And I see a lot of is the one thing I don't like about the Montessori system is that there's, there's almost no negative feedback.

Almost not. Yeah. Yeah. So, and so I look at her quote unquote report card. It's not a report card. It's, you know, it's, you know, it's, she's, is she on average is she, but you know, but it's, it's all positively spun. Right. And my fear is, and I see it with Morgan too. Like a lot of these kids are coming out and they've never had somebody tell them that they sucked at anything. Right. We have two generations of the, of, of, uh, of the thinnest skinned people I've ever seen in my life. And it's our fault. It's, it's, it's, I mean, it's the parent's fault. It's entirely our fault and the boomer's fault for, for, uh, for helicoptering and coddling the American mind in a way that, that has created all sorts of issues of all, you know, of all political or religious or business related or personal or whatever.

But if you can't accept feedback, um, you can't have a conversation, you can't solve a problem. And so this whole thing are as a sales professional, your job is to solve problems. And so you have to learn how to solve problems, which means you have to be willing to have difficult conversations and not assume those conversations and the feedback from those conversations onto your personal identity. That's not your job. Your job is to help others get what they want. That's your job. Yeah. Right. So I agree with you. It's because I remember like Morgan. So Morgan's great, right? Like I think he's, he's different than a lot of the other millennials, in my opinion, you know, he, he's, he's got a lot of the tools, but the one thing he really struggled with, with me specifically was feedback because he, you could see, I'm obviously, you know, like I'm a very direct person.

I have no time for bullshit. I have no time for like to coddle you and make you feel comfortable. Like I'm going to give, I'm going to make you feel comfortable by showing you that I'm investing in you. I'm going to, I'm going to give you the resources. I'm going to give you my time to get, to help you get better and put you in a position to be successful. But when I would give Morgan feedback, you, it was funny because you could literally, he, he, he said, he, he said he wanted feedback, but then when I would give him direct feedback, physically, you would watch him curl up and had like the look on his face was like, I hate everything about what's happening right now. And I'd be like, Morgan, are you okay?

Like, dude, don't, this isn't like, like, it looks like you're really taking this hard. I just need to get this through to you. And this is how I communicate. And he was like, no, no, no, this is, this is good. This is good. But it was almost like, you know, when you're drinking something shitty that, you know, it was like, you know, I know it's good for me, but I don't like it. Like, and I, and I had to break him of that by just continuing, like the tough love was real, but I gave him a foundation of, I give a shit about you. And I think that's the part that a lot of leaders and management miss is that they don't kind of get the give a shit factor involved of like, no, I genuinely care about your success here.

And that's why I'm giving you this feedback, because without this fight feedback, you're, you're not going to be successful. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I see it all day. Um, I, it's why I hire, um, former, um, athletes. Yep. All of my people are people that, um, worked in startups and, or, um, were artists and musicians or, or, or athletes. Um, and because there's something about that, that the journey they had to go on to be successful in those worlds that translates beautifully into, into the world that we're in now. Um, they, they possess the right character and the right mindset and the proper amount of grit, um, uh, to, to be successful. I just want them to give their all and, and learn. Right. And if they learn, they add value to our clients.

Um, and they're the best at it. I think. Yeah. No, I mean, I, I, I go back to, you know, business acumen grit, like the, you know, techniques, you know, I train them all day long and processes and fine. Anybody can learn that shit. Learning how to learn is a skill that is, is, is undervalued, um, grit. Right. And, and just in, and just curiosity, those things at business acumen, like those, though, if I, if I could choose somebody who had those four things versus somebody who was the best seller I've ever seen and has the best product knowledge and knows every technique out there, I would take these kids any day of the week. Absolutely. Because that rate, uh, that rate of change that's happening in our customers, we have to respond to it accordingly as well.

We need to be out in front of that. We need to be recognizing that things change so quickly that the only constant truly, truly is change. It's just the rate and pace of it now is accelerated so much that all of us have to adapt to it in real time. Uh, and if we don't, we're screwed. You think the last question here, uh, do you think the, the, the companies that adopted, because when did six Sigma come out? Like when did like agile six Sigma, when did that stuff really? Yeah. I mean, most of the stuff started with W. Edwards Deming at Ford in the late in the seventies and then Ford sort of rejected his ideas. And so he went to Japan and taught Japan Kaizen. Kaizen. Kaizen. Yeah. Honda. And, um, and then Japan proceeded to use that to crush us in the, in the automotive and technology space through the eighties and nineties.

Um, so that's where it came. That's where most of it. And I guess I'm wondering, do you think that are we at a level of change now that is different than the six Sigma agile mentality was back in the eighties and nineties? Or do you think absolutely think so? I mean, you listen to Ray Kurzweil singularity and he talks about, you know, the, the pace of change is 1,000 times greater will be 1,000 times greater in this century than it was the last. And the last one was 20,000 times greater, uh, than the one prior to it. So it's, uh, it's, it's insane. I mean, by 2040, he predicts that the rate of change, uh, what today is a year will be three months. Do you, so do you think, yeah, well, yeah. Right.

Even dogs are like, damn, you guys die quick. Um, but do you, do you think that, do you think that it's a new mindset though? So say, say I was a six Sigma agile organization and COVID hits now, am I better prepared to, to make this new leap to the new agility factor? Or am I less prepared because I was, I was, my mind, because it's a different type of agility. It's a different type of, of evolution here. Yeah. I, I, I think that I, I think that's a, an operational question. Uh, I think you're asking it operationally and I think the right way to ask it, if I may, is more of a culture and leadership question. Um, if you have the right leadership, that's fully in support of recognizing that change and how it's coming.

And I'll give you a really extreme example, Jeff Bezos. Yep. He's even come out to the market and said, I'm afraid of, I'm afraid we might not be in business in, in, in 2030. Um, because we don't make, you know, I don't, my favorite Amazon thing is, is the most valuable company, not because they make things, but because they make everything easy. Right. Um, and as long as they continue to obsess around that and build the brand around it and stay out of trouble, they'll probably be okay. But, um, that mindset should permeate through every leadership organization on the globe. Uh, my father worked at Intel for just most of his career and he worked directly for Andy Grove, who wrote the book, only the paranoid survive, um, which is one of the greatest business books you'll ever, you'll ever read.

Um, and I don't know if you could call it that today, cause it was very much a terse direct engineering cutthroat mindset at Intel, um, for all those years. And I watched these guys at the dinner table, talk, tell stories and fire each other and hire each other back three minutes later. Um, it just crazy stuff, but, but that you do need to have some sort of, let's say positive, persistent paranoia in order to stay ahead of everything that's going on. And large corporations have an advantage. They have resources, they have an ecosystem and they have customers that they can engage to learn together where the world is going and how they can continue to help them, but they don't execute on it the right way.

Uh, and then the people that are focused in the core business don't necessarily have the right mindset, skillset, uh, experience or framework to do it well. Um, and that's why, again, that's why we exist over you plus the work we do, but that's the same for everyone. I think that, I think that in the innovation economy, what's going to separate the most successful salespeople are growth mindset, their ability to master things through a learn it all approach, uh, and accelerated experiential learning, uh, and their emotional intelligence and their critical thinking and problem solving skills and their subject matter expertise around one thing or another. Yeah. Uh, we're in a whole new world, man.

I keep saying that COVID has accelerated everything 10 times, right? I mean, if, if innovation was on its way, COVID frigging, uh, you know, immediately overnight flipped. Absolutely. And it's creating a greater divide between the people that are willing to, um, take, uh, control of their own destiny, so to speak, um, versus those who are waiting for someone else to do it. It's, so I would say this to every sales professional on the planet, don't wait for somebody to educate you, go out and learn for yourself. Smart MIT professor said education is what others do to you. Learning is what you do for yourself. Yep. Do your own learning. I know in talking to the greatest leaders and most successful people in the world, um, regardless of industry, sector, role, whatever they are, learn it all's.

They're curious. They, they read every day. They take time, uh, to experience new things. They try to take principles that they acquire from other worlds and apply them in their own. Um, they, the older they get, they either to me, people either become bitter or philosophers, right? So the philosophers are the ones that are always trying to, uh, improve themselves and those around them through the things that they learn and through their, their collection of experiences in life. And I would, I, you know, I would just simply, you know, leave it with, with, um, that you need to become a student of human behavior. If you're not already, if you haven't already become a student of human behavior, you need to because that's what I'm rereading.

Yeah, no, uh, absolutely. I love Robert Caldani. Yeah. Um, the, the, um, and it's a fantastic book and there's many others like that. Uh, and you can absorb something from all of them, but you can also absorb from amazing ancient texts. Dr. Wayne Dyer wrote this compendium book called wisdom of the ages, which is one of my top five greatest all time books. And he took all the lessons and learnings from every ancient, uh, uh, philosophy and religion and culture, whether it's Buddhas or it's, or it's Confucius or it's Jesus or it's, you know, um, uh, Taoism, right. Whatever it is and put them all together in a very, in a very simple way that just gives you this guide to how to go through life.

And I think that if we, as much as change is constant, the, in the, with respect to innovation, the one thing that is also constant is human behavior. Yeah. Things around us are changing all day, but human behavior isn't. Yep. You know, people do things, why, and all that other stuff. And we know so little about the brain. We don't know anything about consciousness. We don't know why we exist. We don't know the reason for being, we don't even know if we exist. Like, like, let's talk about either. I mean, I could, we could go on a whole different track about Elon Musk and us being in the matrix and all that other shit. I actually tweeted, I tweeted Elon Musk the other day. I was, I was begging for an answer because he talks and I'm, I'm actually on his plane.

Like, like there was a strong possibility that we're in the matrix. Right. And I, but I said to him, I go, Elon, if we're in the matrix, then is there such a thing as free will? Yeah. So, so no. So, so, um, Dr. David Eagleman wrote a book on this called incognito, the secret lives of the brain. Um, it's all about the, his hypothesis is one of the guys that developed FMRI frequency magnetic resonance imaging that allows us to follow blood flow and oxygen in the brain to, to, to create breadcrumb trails about how the brain works. And his hypothesis based on his research is, is that we are, um, our, our conscious mind is, is, is we think our conscious mind is a keyboard and our subconscious mind is, is the, is the computer power.

Yeah. It's the opposite. Yeah. Uh, Sam Harris talks about this all the time as well, which is incredible. Um, you know, Malcolm Gladwell has done work on this and blink, um, John Medina, uh, with brain rules at the university of Washington and his research, you know, Robert Sapolsky at Stanford. I mean, these guys, um, there's a new book just came out called a thousand brains. That is, they're calling this the, the, the Darwin of, of, of the brain. Um, and I can't remember the author's name at the moment, but I've just started to dig into it, but it's fascinating in his, his assessment essentially is, is that there are a thousand different brains inside of your brain and they all operate differently for different reasons.

You know, we don't know anything about the, you know, we don't know why the neocortex is makes us different than, than, uh, than chimps. Uh, we don't know where it happened. I think the aliens brought it to us. Um, I think it was, I think it was mushrooms and I'm loving, I'm loving the, you know, all these alien papers getting released from the Pentagon. I mean, I can't wait for it to find intelligent life somewhere in the universe. Cause it doesn't exist here. Um, I'm telling you, like, like I said, we could go down that rabbit hole. Let's, let's wait, let's hold out for another one. Cause I, I gotta get stoned for that conversation. Awesome. What, what, uh, let's, let's wrap this up. What, uh, what do you, what do you want people to know?

Go, uh, anything that you're working on these days? Sure. I mean, they can connect with me on LinkedIn. They can follow me on Twitter, Instagram at Sean a shepherd, S E A N A S H E P P A R D. Check out the U plus website, the letter U dot P L U S or usertechnologies.com. We can help you there. Shoot me a note, referencing the podcast. Every time I'm on this, I get wonderful outreach from people and they send me notes and, um, and they either love it or they hate it, but, but, but, um, but I'm, always happy to be helpful to the, uh, to the sales community. You know that. Yeah, absolutely. Sean. And, and you've been kind of one of those pioneers that I've, I've respected and appreciated through over the years, because what you did, um, with growth X, uh, back then with about creating that, that, that certificate program coming out and educating, really educating on sales, not just training on sales, but like the essence of it is something that I always had that kind of always said, if I was independently wealthy, I would have tried to do something similar to that.

And then I bumped into you guys. I was like, all right, good. Somebody, you know, somebody, somebody took that and ran with it and did a great job. So thanks for everything you do. And I appreciate it. Thanks Johnny. Yeah, no problem. And everybody else, hopefully this conversation got you to think, uh, and, and again, just really that growth mindset, really lean into that, right? Because if you are, if you are waiting for things to get back to normal at this point, again, you've already lost. You gotta embrace the suck, embrace the change, hug the elephant, and, and try new shit all the time and educate yourself on risk and educate yourself on what it is and how, what role it plays. It's, it's critical.

It's one of the major reasons deals fall out of the bottom of the funnel. Awesome. Awesome. Everybody will, like I always say, look, uh, if you have a shitty day, go make somebody smile today. Cause even if you had a shitty day, if you made somebody smile, you know, you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you y'all for listening and I will see you on the flip side. All right, y'all, this has been an amazing conversation. Disqualifying instead of qualifying all the time makes all the difference in the world. Also show up and throw up has to become an antiquated line of thinking in our selling environment today. And how do we teach our young sellers to think critically and be genuinely curious?

This question plagues every sales leader everywhere, even if they're unwilling to admit it. Here's some closing notes for you. We've released a continuous learning platform that's based on your needs from prospecting all the way up to customer success. We cover a gambit of sales lessons, techniques, and strategies that will change everything about the way that you sell. Become a member today at on demand.jbarrows.com and I'll see you there. Follow us on Instagram at JB sales training, all one word. We deliver amazing tips and strategies there every day with Morgan, John, Meg, Leslie, and myself. Bolster your brand by sharing what you've learned on this episode with your network. It helps to share content to drive a following that you could later sell to.

Doesn't that make sense? And join us for our live weekly webinars. Find them at jbarrows.com in the blog and events section. We'll see you next week, everyone, for another stellar conversation that will help you and your team sell better. Make it happen, everybody.