J. Ryan Williams: Insights on Honest Conversations and Effective Leadership

what is this conference and this lead worth to you he said like i don't know 250k and the sales rep shit themselves because they just weren't ready for that answer hey everyone welcome back to make it happen mondays where we talk about sales business entrepreneurship personal growth mental health and everything in between with guests who i truly respect and i think make a positive impact on the world around us and uh this is a fun one uh this is my good friend ryan williams now ryan's a longtime friend uh i've trained a couple of clients he's been at a few times and also he's a certified executive coach and now ceo of anteater media where he helps founders build revenue pipeline through short form video content he built a 58 million dollar sales team at ad roll coached over 400 startup ceos and seen the zero to 100 million journey with three sas companies so he is just filled with knowledge far more than i have quite frankly and it was funny because usually we do a little bit of an intro and i'm like all right look we're gonna get going here and i kick things off i'm like hey ryan what's up to intro the podcast this one though uh we just started talking and i was like i need to record this and i hit record and so you're just gonna jump right into the middle of the conversation there's no setup on this one but we went all over the place we talked about sales and where people are right now and what reps need to do to build trust uh how to really instill confidence as a leader in your organization talked about transparency and the level of transparency and just a really good holistic conversation about sales and where things are going and what we need to do to be successful and some gems along the way uh he's got some great book recommendations and tips that he has out there as well so i hope you enjoy this conversation as much as i did let's make it happen what's a win for you with your podcast just a good conversation man that's it yes yeah it's you know everybody loves you know the authenticity the no bullshit uh tactic anything tactical but these days um you know i'm telling sales reps that we don't have any option anymore to be average like you have to level the fuck up across the board and and business acumen is one of the i'm telling people like i don't care forget about your sales skills and all that other stuff like you'll get better at that but if you can learn how to have a business conversation about what happens so you can have empathy for the people that you're reaching out to you have a chance because the one thing that ai can't do is fundamentally it can't give a shit like it can pretend to give a shit but it can't genuinely give a shit and i think i think honestly connect i think when we talk about like sales reps and why they hate sales reps is because most of them go through the fucking motions and they're useless and they're quite frankly they bring zero value to the equation in any way shape or form but if you can have a conversation with me like first of all a normal don't bring me through a fucking process and b maybe you don't have to bring insights but you have to be curious enough to potentially get me to think i think beck holland said something that really got me uh that hit me which is you know executives specifically they don't want to be asked like for you to qualify an executive you don't i don't need to know what my fucking problems are i know what my problems are so you going through this process to find out what my problems are what i don't know or where my blind spots are what i don't know is what what maybe the root cause of this problem is because i'm surface level it's like oh i need top of funnel whatever it is so i need training it's like do you or do you need deliverability do you need you have the right people so i think it's that like like being curious enough to to to have a conversation and dig is what i'm looking for versus anybody can bring me through a fucking bant questions and drone through demos here which i can't stand so yeah i think that's an interesting starting point in terms of like what the sales rep can actually do is because many people so empathy and caring is is one is one set of skills but there's also this like a bit of curiosity where if you attach curiosity uh to a lens focus back on yourself let's say you're 22 year old sales rep out there you know i'll box a dewalt tools in the back of your truck trying to figure out what's next and who and who's going to close next if you start with a curiosity of what do i have to offer right so i used to tell reps on my team they'd come to me and they'd say everybody seems to get promoted off your team what gives you know an ad role i was running a 58 million dollar sales team and at one point i looked back at it all and of our like 12 or 13 mid-market sales reps or sales leaders they were all carrying about a 16 million dollar bag 10 or 11 of them came off my team there's maybe 12 of them at the time maybe one didn't come from my team and everybody kept asking me like why is this why is this why is this i found out later that it had that it was a little more complicated than just this one piece of advice but when somebody said hey i want to go get promoted as a sales rep i would say start with your boss's okrs you know we had a great bp of sales later at cro who would stand up and give us in the company update this is what i want to do for the next 90 days what sales rep writes that down and says i'm going to go get involved in that problem right because that's somebody who's curious who's actually saying what can i give to this executive problem whether that's that's an internal example the external example is to you know we just it's not as easy as like hey i subscribe to this thing or ask chat gpt what you're worried about what keeps you up at night and now i'm going to go try to connect with you about it like sometimes that works but if you can do it at home right if you can do that you know start start at home like what does your roommate care about how do you connect with them right what is it what is a big day so like when i was in my early 20s my roommate and i had very little in common we went to the same college we bumped into each other on the streets of chicago trying to find an apartment literally like we're out on the street i'm looking going door to door trying to find something out of the back back before we had you know phones that would tell us everything uh you know i'm there with the chicago reader trying to find an apartment so but i bump into nate and we had very different lives very different companies you know the things that were important to me were not the things that were important to him and once we figured out how to be curious about each other it was a lot more fun to live together first of all but that same skill can come with you to work oh absolutely you know what what do your peers care about what does your boss care about and then you go okay well how can i be helpful right and so you know the admiral story like you know shresh lays out his plan he goes hey we need to open an office in europe you didn't know between london or dublin at the time and i'd have reps ask me like hey what what can i do to get noticed well we don't have territories who have you called in london lately who are you calling in europe this is pre-gdpr right so admiral was was able to sell that territory pretty good um and uh and the the reps who said i'm gonna take my vertical knowledge and go call this list those are the ones that would kill it and get noticed and come up the management meetings it was actually that simple right can the same thing be true in the industry i think probably hey i hope you're enjoying the conversation so far i want to take a quick minute to share with you what i'm working on these days with my new jb sales membership it includes live monthly training delivered by me on my two signature courses which are filling the funnel and driving a close that cover all aspects of the sales process it also includes monthly workshops that'll be running on specific sales skills and different tech skills like chat gvt and how to leverage ai throughout the entire sales process finally the membership gives you access to my entire online catalog with every course and every tip i've ever done and as an exclusive offer to my podcast listeners if you go to jbarrows.com click on the individual membership link and use coupon code podcast at checkout you'll get 25 off now let's get back to the conversation i agree with that absolutely and i you know i sum that up as a give a shit factor like do you care right it's it's it's do you care enough to look to that next level to look to that person from an empathetic standpoint to see you know what does a day in a life look like of a cto like what do they get asked on a day-to-day basis you know forget about what the pitch says and all these other things like let me think of them as a person and how can i do help that's actually i'm telling a lot of reps right now like stop thinking about sales become problem solvers period just become a fucking problem solver and surround yourself almost with like pick your you know whoever your icp is this is what i used to do when i was a kid uh in sales was um i would then go find all the vendors that were associated and supported that client right so whether they were existing vendors or new ones and i would then just call up the top rep in whatever that vendor was and i'd be like hey can you and i like meet once a month just to talk about you looks like you go after the same type of clients i do that type of thing when i find opportunities i'll bring you in and if you find any opportunities here would you bring me in and i would just develop like 10 relationships where i would just every month talk to them and be like hey what's up and then when i was sitting there working with a client i'd be like diagnosing whatever their problem was and i'd be like actually this isn't something i can help with but you know what you should bring in so and so you should talk to you whatever right that type of thing and that just that even just that recommendation of like hey you know i could probably help you out here but it's not going to be perfect um i know somebody else who's better at it than i am so let me introduce you them and then once that's settled maybe we can do some business together and i can help just that alone brings your credibility through the roof and then they actually start paying attention and listening to you so i saw that one time in real time uh i think it was an accident but i should give credit where credit is due like the ad role marketing team did a great job but i was sent to a conference in chicago we got there at the booth was a stack of uh small folios passport size like 10 page little booklets like you might get taking your kid to the zoo or whatever and there was a whole stack of these and that was basically eight problems that were being solved at the conference and page one was uh an attribution thing page two was like a um you know back-end e-commerce thing and there were a bunch of different things on there um and what we were basically invited to do is anybody who came to the booth who had one of these other problems give them the passport and send them off on their way and what that did was it increased our traffic flow from all these other booths where they said oh well after you figure out the thing we solve then you need to figure out how to advertise and so you can scale that up and that it worked like a champ and then later on as you know as my career progressed i discovered exactly why that is and that's something about the way trustworthiness works which is you know it was on my list to talk about because you've seen a lot of sales reps that you trust and i'm sure you've met a lot that you don't i think it comes down to to a pretty simple way to look at it but um but in this case if you're willing to send somebody a solution their problem that you don't benefit from that is such low self-orientation no yes give a shit factor is high in it for me factor is low low yep that's what changes the game and i think when it's genuine right i think a lot of people do things with the idea that eventually they're going to come back and try to cash in on whatever that was but i think if you genuinely go about it as i'm just trying to help and whatever it is what it is if it comes back around it comes back around but if it doesn't it doesn't i'm a big believer in karma and all that shit anyways so yeah you know it might not come back in the short term but definitely in the long term and that's how i've lived my entire career basically so i was thinking about uncomfortable questions because i when i was i saw i had to look back up to see who it was because i didn't know him but um you did an episode i think with andres uh was it laris yeah yeah negotiation i i didn't recognize him as somebody that i that i'd crossed paths with before but you were talking about like having you had said to him something about how like reps that can like ask like the biggest problem was people not asking for the whole deal like selling themselves short shooting themselves in the foot and i forget what the whole story was but what i thought was a real takeaway for me is like we have to be ready to have mature conversations right you're talking about having business curiosity and having like an acumen to have a like have a real conversation and that example where budget's concerned actually solving the problem and having a sense of it you know a few years ago i was in as a as a leadership coach for a ceo that had three people on a sales team he's about to raise series b uh company was doing great you know backed by excel backed by y combinator taking off um but he didn't have a sales leader so he asked me to step in and like do some leadership coaching and i had one of the people on the team had to go on a trip to a conference and um and they had said you know this will never get approved because it's so expensive it was an overseas thing it was last minute uh i had actually suggested taking a flight that wasn't going to leave them exhausted uh and spend a little more money upgrade the ticket etc and the pushback i got from the rep was like this is never going to fly i said okay bring it to the sales meeting get to the sales meeting and it's my turn to my turn to go and i said hey ceo called him out i said what is this conference and this lead worth to you he said like i don't know 250k and the sales rep shit themselves because they just weren't ready for that answer like there's a world where the thing that you're doing is worth more than my mom's house it's all relative you know and i don't mean to make light of that because you know you're not that's not that's not for a yelp ad subscription by the way at four hundred dollars a month that and no offense to the you know velocity selling and bsmb and smb like yeah go get it you know but it's a different motion in this case it was go see this client i don't care if it costs and this was like a fifteen thousand dollar you know experience i was like oh well that's a no-brainer then if it's a 10x roi just for me to get on the ground my boss wants it that bad you know but that there's a maturity there's a business maturity to being able to say this is what it costs us this is what we're going to have back whether you're proposing budget or you're going internal to like justify or uh explain a business case you got to have a a mature conversation or being willing to go there and i think you have to i mean look a lot of this comes with experience and stuff like that but it also comes i think from a leadership standpoint putting the reps in a position to have those conversations you know what i mean like giving them the background of why they should be asking these stuff and what things certain costs and the value of those things because that's that's what we've skipped right my whole pitch these days as far as you know the the golden age of sales between 2010 and 2022 like we've over-engineered the sales process and we forgot all about business fundamentals and and that type of shit and now these kids can't even have a conversation because you know it's hard and so getting back to you know just letting the reps listen to a conversation like this you know what i mean having your executive team come in once a month once a week once a month to talk to the team about what what it means when a when a company goes through a merger and acquisition you know how to how do people really look at pnls what does the cfo look at from a budgetary standpoint like when was the last time any client who's listening to this potentially right now had their cfo come in and say hey i just want to let you guys know like i know you all call cfos and you try to do this roi bullshit none of that works because this is how i look at your investments like 80 of what we invest in throughout the year is not something we have budgeted right it doesn't happen this this happened to me you know a few years ago i was headed out to dinner with a couple friends the guys that i know from summer camp right like these aren't people that i i casually know or even went to college with like we used to shower together when we were 10 right so i can ask him anything yeah and one one fella is a uh one of my buddies was a cfo of a three billion dollar company that was owned by private equity uh uh backed firm and so he had been around the venture space he had had a couple ipos already he was at this company and his friend from summer camp is like fucking around on his whiteboard you know he's like dude stop it you know that you know what i'm talking about right like i'm ready to go i don't give a shit what his job is i'm playing with the legos i'm writing stuff on the whiteboard he's like dude stop it i need to get out of here i shouldn't have even signed you in to come up here right and so somewhere in all this i said hey just curious you're the cfo of a company that's worth three bill you've got you know they're doing they're they're well crossed 100 million dollar threshold i said what do you care about and he said uh don't tell anybody except for the john barrels podcast um he said you know don't don't don't tell anybody but if i tell everybody on the floor that i need to read anything over 50k but i really can't get to it unless it's 100k and above i have somebody on my team who knows how to read it for me between 50 and 100 and then there are some leaders who do this and when he said that i thought it was so interesting because it wasn't just like it wasn't just the like you know kind of corporate shield like acknowledgement of like hey i can't do it all so here's what i do that's one that's one piece of the story that's the only thing you get you get enough of the story but there's actually a bigger piece here which is um what do i have time to care about and what are the types of things that are big enough where there's two signature lines or three biggest deal i ever did or hardest one it's actually not the biggest deal but the hardest deal i ever did had four signature lines that had to be done by the end of the year and i'll tell you what these four people don't travel together with their kids they're all going different directions for the holidays right so and it was a giant it was a giant pain to get that done you know um thankfully it worked out but i went back to that conversation with my friend about the stuff he actually cares about this is high enough for my neck to be on the line this is high enough where i pinning it to somebody else he didn't say it like that but he was talking about internal responsibilities he was talking about who won the team you could trust new cfo i raised like oh you got a new cfo that's the time to bomb in with like show them how great you are at sales it's like new cfo cfo doesn't have their sidekick lieutenant who reads their stuff that person's trying to read everything for the first 90 days because they're trying to figure out if they if the business is the right size you know that's no time for this fancy sales stuff and garbage of unless you know them so that what i find is like everybody talks about triggers like like don't you dare if somebody starts a new company jump all that be like hey if they've never talked to you before let's talk but if you've if you've worked with them in the past that's exactly when you should reach out to be like yo ryan what's up man i know you're just getting the dust settled let me know if you want me to come in and teach the team some to give you some breathing room so that we can do some outbound here in the short term right then it's like yes please john because i know you i know what you bring to the table that type of stuff i can trust you to your point and i can use this to buy because no no executive is going to make a decision on some brand new software as the first decision that they've ever made in an organization it's just not going to happen so yeah there i think there are a couple times where you might have somebody who's like coming at it like so one thing i i when i was doing more advisory and more coaching of founders i would tell people to look at job descriptions that are or job postings if you're looking at a fintech company that has a vp of compliance job posted that is a giant billboard that says they are breaking the law and the board knows about it right think about that like somebody had to approve that job description it's vp of compliance i want you to make sure you do x and y and z so we don't get sued well that is a big billboard that says we are actually breaking law right now or we are about to hurry the fuck up right so so think about that when you're prospecting and it's like oh i saw you've got a vp of compliance listed maybe this time to talk about x and y it's like um they're in an urgent situation and there are ways you could potentially help if you're not helping you maybe should get out of the way and wait a few months for the dust to settle for that role to be in place right but i want to go back and disagree with you just a little bit just to just a touch you know the idea about you know everybody that you know when you're going out there and saying you know i i need to make sure i'm 100 totally give you know give give value without expecting anything in return i think it's also okay that we we merge that advice with the idea of having a mature business conversation if you emailed a cro friend and you said hey i know you're there you're in a new spot pro bono training let me give you some breathing room i'll get everybody on the same page in my case you came in to checkmate to help us do negotiation and prospecting and you jumped in at a time when we're like look we can't do it all as sales leaders john's going to come in trusted you know somebody we trust content we trust stuff we've seen already come in and do this and that's one day of us breathing easy the kids have heard it from a second adult right which is as you know as a parent like sometimes they do this um but uh but it's also okay to offer that and say i'm doing this and here's what i'm getting out of it let me call this out and say hey the thing that i'm getting out of this is like i want to be on your list i want to be on track to be a vendor of record because i i haven't worked with x before you probably don't have very many of those you haven't worked with but i want to be in your system i don't care if you only pay me a dollar i want to help you out first and foremost i also want to be in your system for when things get interesting you're going to have to evaluate sales options you have to evaluate training and i just want to be i just want to be in the conversation so somebody else in the org knows my value so you don't have to vouch for me later yeah and i think the difference for me is is the explicit or implicit intent in the sense that yes i agree with you on that one in the sense like hey ryan happy to help you out right now here look when the times get right man like can we talk about doing some other stuff like i think it's it's the people that that to me that you know there's an ulterior motive for why they're doing it and they're not expressing it i'm fine with the people that express it and be like yeah no i am doing and and look the negotiations on my end is always give to get in the sense that it's like i'm happy to give that to you and the reciprocity versus quid pro quo and in order for me to give you exactly what you need this is what i need in return from you right so there is some equality there but i i find that there is a disingenuous um group out there that is that does things and then all of a sudden later on it's like you you feel like you owe them even though you didn't ask for what they did and it's like i didn't ask for that so i i appreciate it they're actually trainers teaching to do that make people feel on the hook right yeah isn't that the whole give a flower at the airport thing oh yeah well that's your reciprocity that and again that's the difference between manipulation versus influence right like when you know for a fact the reciprocity and you're using kind of influence to manipulate situations because i'll take the flower and it's like oh i don't want the flower but now that i took it i feel obligated to have this fucking conversation yeah like that's the negative intent behind it the real intent is to get you exactly what you're looking for and i think there's a fine line of it but you're right yeah actually how many times have you heard somebody in sales talk about becoming the client's trusted advisor all day every day right everybody always says it but but how many reps and leaders do you know who've actually read the book called trusted advisor zero fucking zero right so um i i wanted to share this with you because when it came into my life it was like light bulbs went on and i think it might i think it might be interesting for both reps and leaders to to have a look you don't you don't have to read this whole book so don't don't sales people who are are busy getting their windshield time and don't worry you don't have to buy this on audible but um there's a book actually called the trusted advisor and it comes from david meister and his team and what they did is they researched how someone buys legal services okay okay so you're going out and you're trying to buy a lawyer or buy a lawyer's time rather right you're trying to go hire a lawyer and so these guys went and did some research and and realized that there is a a very simple mathematical equation to how someone evaluates the trustworthiness of their future attorney and it's four elements we've already talked about the most important element uh on this show already which is self-orientation but we're going to come back to that so element number one is credibility credibility is what do you know element number two reliability what do you do element number three is intimacy which intimacy is a weird business word but but think about psychological safety do you feel safe around this person okay and take those three letters and then add them together and then divide them by self-orientation so i'll give you an example right so if you're going to go buy a car everybody knows a used car salesman is the most sleazy out there right that's what that's what that's what gives us the bad rap i think there's more than that that gives us a bad rap in sales but start there because everybody knows the analogy when that person shows you what they know because they know the market and they know what your car is worth or they're able to be helpful sales rep can be one of the most helpful people when that person continuously shows up they say i'm going to send you offers when i see them you never hear from them again yeah i knew you weren't reliable when you trust them with your email and you or your phone number and they do text you things that are hey i didn't hey john i didn't see anything this week that met your criteria but i wanted to let you know i'm doing the my end of week reporting i'm just telling you report out i didn't see anything but i'm looking okay that's really helpful especially if you're shopping for something unique intimacy um why is it that you really want to go get a subaru brat right you know or whatever whatever it is you're searching for like being able to like confide in the your weird buying habit or whatever it is um how does somebody make you feel there's a great zig ziglar story from a car lot where there's one rep who comes up and says oh man what a beater can't wait to get you into something new and zig's guy goes up and says john that was a great car the 76 buick was i just made something up because i'm not a car guy but 76 buick was a great car when they came out it served you well it looks like you raised the kids in that car as opposed to like your seats are torn up and actually just connects with you and just says instead of making you feel bad like who how many times you get on with the vendor who makes you feel dog shit about your last decision oh use hubspot you haven't upgraded to salesforce yet fuck you man you know oh you're a sales off guy instead of outreach i could give a shit about sales tools now i used to care i used to care a lot but i don't i don't care now you know i just because now i know basic elements right so credibility what you know reliability what you do intimacy how you make people feel and then why are you doing it so go back to the car lot guy approaches you and says look i want to talk to you about your car and you go no no no i'm not ready to talk i just want to walk around i just want to see what you have like step back jimmy and and what if jimmy said instead i know looking for a car can be tough to figure out who you want to talk with i'm over here when you're ready just to let you know uh we don't have commissions on fridays or whatever i just made that up but but what if but what if there is something where it's like just want to let you know the way this is set up you know you're i'm just here to answer questions or um i only get paid when you're happy or whatever it is and you know the car lot might break down when we talk about self-orientation because we know this person's on commission but can that person demonstrate that the commission is not as valuable as the relationship and i think that you know in transaction like cars that's why it fall fails right because they don't look at okay well that's on a four-year lease so that gets a guy's never going to come back whatever it is it's the biggest transaction you'll have without a personal relationship whereas like why doesn't happen your real estate agent she lives in the neighborhood right you've known her from somebody else you got introduced by somebody else yeah yeah it's interesting trust is a hard thing right now i think that's why people say they buy from people they they like and i i disagree i think they buy from people they trust i don't necessarily need to like you but i need to trust what you're saying to me is real is true and you know i think right now because we are so transaction oriented and you know because we've just abused uh the process over the past 10 years uh the trust factor is like worse than it ever has been yeah i don't trust you with my email anymore no i don't trust you with my phone number right you're probably going to text me even when i opt out exactly and so it you know i'm i'm the question is is like how do you build trust in a short i actually just had ted mckenna from jolt effects uh this morning i had him i had him on the podcast and he you know they talk about how sales reps need to you know become problem solvers and all this other stuff about really making sure they are not necessarily the detailed expert in the product but know enough to not just be like sorry i don't know but on the flip side they talked about how building trust admitting you don't know is actually a way of building trust like admitting a certain component of your solution isn't the best but this is where we shine or hey i don't know that i'll get back to you so i asked him like what's the line of of expertise if you will these days that gives you enough credibility to have the conversation and have somebody to trust you but also doesn't you don't need to be that full-blown solutions engineer who knows everything about it so what's your perspective on that like how how much of uh and we could talk about the predictable revenue model and how it's all falling apart in front of our face right now but if we just look at the sales rep right like call it an ae at the end of the day um where do you think the line is now of of how much they need to know about the product the solution that type of thing and how deep they need to go versus you know using a solutions engineer and that type thing to be able to build that trust and carry that conversation i think the easiest shortcut or hack to that is to think about who's your client want to talk to right so if your client needs to talk to somebody who is at expert level then you might actually go to a model that looks more like the famous atlassian not having sales people they didn't have they didn't not have sales people they had a process where every engineer was responsible to answer the phone that's not a you know it when you're not trying to like write an article about it that has clickbait in it that's actually sounds pretty responsible when you're selling something that's very technical when it's let me tell you why atlassian hates sales then of course i'm going to click it of course i'm going to get angry but they're not the only people getting paid for angry eyeballs these days if you've been on cnn or fox or whatever your your pleasure is right um that that's all that's another that's another conversation but in terms of the level of expertise um let's be honest with ourselves about who this customer wants to talk to and so if you are selling something that requires configuration requires a technical degree to use require you know cost the same as a full-time employee then i think you got to be honest with yourself as an ae that you are an appointment center and if you don't like being an appointment center then be a facilitator if you don't like being a facilitator then think about yourself as a deal midwife you know i don't care what works for you but your job is to make sure the process goes smooth and nobody gets hurt and everybody has the best possible outcome and if you introduce yourself that way and say look the thing that you're buying is very technical so i'm going to help get you set on the right foot um and and then you just say i just need to qualify you with a couple questions budget authority need and timeline you're good i'm just kidding but you know if instead of qualifying you think about it as like let's go connect and see how i can be helpful one thing i could know as a rep without having to get technical is i could know how everybody else buys this i could have an industry insight that i could lead with and say you know what most people it takes them six months to buy this you just told me that you didn't want to talk to me because you're in a hurry is a hurry six months that's a close-ended question open-ended question the same thing is what does being in a hurry mean to you excuse me another version could be scale of one to ten how important is it that you have this done by the end of july it's a nine oh so it's really important to you how you know i'm looking at your website now looks like joe is your ceo how important is it to joe oh it's a five to joe okay so you don't have internal alignment yet no i'm not going to ask that on our first date right so first phone call with somebody i'm not going to say i quite like that but that dramatic example is one to maybe cue off of and think about that as a rep um if you're not curious about i mean you you asked this question but we came full circle to where we started if you're not curious enough about your own value and offering you know i think that's why sales is so damn hard is because it touches on it touches on confidence touches on value and worth for us as individuals it touches on to you know some some some and and people who had you know have had touches with issues of confidence or or uh or with you know demonstrating value from their systems they grew up in or schools they've been a part of or other companies they were at like we all carry our life experiences with us so when you think oh why would they ever want to talk to me well think about it this way in most you know most sales reps can become an expert in way less than 10 000 hours right i think if you're a sales rep you can become an expert in the deal process in about half of the time of the time of the sales cycle so let's say i'm selling you a six month piece of cloud software let's say it's cost a hundred thousand dollars and um and it takes six months to buy in three months as of even the most junior ae i have probably done more conversations about implementation and how to buy something or you know discovery and maybe it's not implementation depends on your process right it could be uh how to how to qualify that the products right for you i will have been part of more of those conversations with the cto than the times that cto will have to go through it in their career cto has 20 jobs let's just say they work in silicon valley companies like us so they go really fast so you have 20 20 jobs in the course of their career they probably are doing doing this part like what six times half of those jobs they need to find a new cloud host let's say they're buying anybody else half the times they're doing that okay so can i talk to six people and be able to share industry insights within three months i should be able to you know and be able to offer that so i don't know i mean that's that's kind of a blurry answer to your question but i think you could become an expert in the stuff that you're supposed to be an expert in very quickly yeah and i think that's where you know you could even become an expert i mean i was i was working with outreach um last week and doing their training and i kept telling the reps like who here worked at a company before like that that like was in sales before coming here to outreach like not came from college right what's their what was the breakdown it was like 75 had already worked at a previous company they were somewhere else before yeah there were somewhere else and i'm like did you have outreach before you worked here you know like 90 of them didn't i'm like are you that much more effective now using outreach to do your job like just think of yourself as self as a sales rep and your ability to execute and fill your pipeline how much better is it now using outreach than it was using whatever you were before everybody's like yeah so much better i go then tell that fucking story because if you're reaching out to a vp of sales like most of your brand new most of you don't have like you know all the nuances of the product but you're calling into vps of sales who have a bunch of people just like you who are just as inefficient as you were before your previous job call them up and tell that story be like yo i don't know what you're doing but i was at a company before that wasn't using this now i'm over here and here's my workflow here's how much more efficient i am i know your reps are probably dealing with some of the same challenges i would love to show you that transition for me like that's such a natural easy story to tell yeah and you know the people who are killing it with that specific story are the what i see are the reps who are also not afraid to put that online they go to marketing and they say look at my stats the a reps aren't aren't worried about somebody looking over their shoulder and using them as an internal case study and outreach is a great example we don't always have that that clear of an example but here's the homework that i would give to somebody who's thinking about about using media to bring more inbound leads and they're just slightly suspicious thinking maybe short short form youtube uh maybe linkedin videos are seeing a lot more linkedin video lately somebody who's thinking about that who just had the prompt that you gave them tell the story about before you had outreach i would want them to actually think about what are four or five things that were true about your life and sales and have outreach only be one of those things because that vp of sales who's our age is a long way away from being uh because frankly like john even i know you prospect for your own business but it's not the same with because you're carrying 20 years of history i'm not making inside the world's best companies yeah yeah so so you can't actually go back to that old john like as much you want to give yourself advice you can't picture that world but if somebody came to you and said hey john here's what your reps are going through because here's what i went through recently we're really distracted because you asked us to use this thing that's on our phone but all my notifications are on so every time i get my phone out i'm seeing a snap from my girlfriend or i'm seeing a thing from my college buddies or i'm on instagram and like instagram has sent me a thing of like oh you didn't respond to this post this time and so now i find myself losing big blocks of time well that's something i didn't have to go to back in my you know i never did a thousand dials but i did a freaking lot of them but in those in those those days i didn't have that distraction so that sales rep now can understand expertise in teaching people that have have our level of experience hey this is what it's like right now for us you know yeah i know you're cool john you got snap and i know you're cool you got instagram but you're using it very differently because all my friends we're not texting each other we're dming yeah is that true for your family uh my mom sent me that message on facebook but uh awkward you know like i'm not keeping like my mom's got three messages in my facebook queue right now i'm like i just don't have time yeah you know i love you mom if you're listening but like i i don't have time for the meme stuff the the the memeable stuff i somehow make time when it's my friends you know or it's text text that i'm getting from lars with you and dog on the like yeah i can reply to those but you know when i'm getting facebook messages from my mom i'm not doing that right now so anyway so my point is if the rep or whoever is thinking okay it's time to build trust well i'm going to build trust from my experience by sharing what i know i know what it's like to be at this station in life to be 24 years old to be selling for the second or third time i know a lot more than my bp of sales does about how hard it is on the street right now if i use that to complain at the sales meeting or to ask for more money i start to lose trust but if i use that to teach my clients let's say you're outreaching your your sales selling the sales and and i'm going to teach my clients what's what's it like right now that's really interesting if i'm open about outreach's shortcomings because i love manny but i'm sure the product has issues like every product has issues if i'm open and honest about it and saying hey here's the workaround that i use with google docs or whatever they're doing these days then boom that credibility has shot up because i just showed you low self-orientation and i taught you something which is credibility what you know and so now that trustworthiness factor goes up so if you're thinking about doing short form media tell the whole story tell tell your experience tell what it's like using the product tell people what you would do if you use the product like you know because everybody's had a rep who doesn't know say look here's what what's true about the business like dude calm down look at the whole picture like i've been buying this stuff for years you're new to it tell me something that's novel that you see being new to it that's the you know it's interesting because i think you know so many companies are still afraid to let their reps post on social about stuff that isn't like company approved yeah and and it's almost like if you if you allowed every person that came on board at your company to post and share about their onboarding journey and what they're learning right so it's like hey today i came out of boot camp and i just realized like outreach can do this and holy shit it blew my mind because i'd never been to check this out right and you know that type of thing like the amount of pr and trust you would build by allowing like first line people who have never used this shit before to then share what they're learning about the product and the onboarding it's literally like marketing in a box and you don't even have to try who's the gal that you interviewed about owned media a few weeks ago oh i forgot amanda is it yeah amanda yeah amanda bagley over it yeah and i was so i was struck by not only that interview but but but i amanda has since reached out and i've seen um her her great videos on linkedin of like hey this is what the week's like and i was thinking about that i was thinking gosh you know how powerful is that that that the company is enabled a rep to talk about because am i right that she's she's an ae yeah so talking about the industry from the ae perspective she doesn't overreach she's not making stuff up she's not claiming to know everything in the industry she knows her uh i don't station in life i don't mean that to be sound as you know as as it sounds but she understands what the opportunity is from that perspective and she's owning it how cool is that you know and so what i would want you know and my new company any of her focuses on helping ceos go do the two hard things know what to say and then how to get it live and in short form content right because what i saw with my executive coaching clients is you know i've had probably 400 ceos i've worked with over the last seven years about 100 sales leaders and about 40 navy seals there's several things that were you know that are universal why the nation why the nation navy seals they found me really yeah i saw a uh when i was at 500 startups as an eir there was an internal posting that said we need someone to talk about venture to this group of transitioning navy guys i went and discovered that there is a whole uh you know in special forces you got guys that are trained much longer than the big navy or big army and um and what happens is you got somebody with 10 years of training they missed grad school where we all met at grad school or they missed um some other early 20s experience where we're all finding and connecting and working at the same companies or in my case a lot of 20 year olds worked at admiral like the guys coming out of the military who came out went to school you know on kind of the standard track two three four years in they're fine they are able to catch up but folks in the who took the special forces track actually are several years to go catch up right even if they did grad school as part of what they did within the military and so what i found was that um you know there is a universal fear that happens for ceos and navy seals and sales leaders alike we all have something we're scared of even the people you look up to there's something they're scared of right you think michael jordan's coolest guy in the world i know you're not chicago sports guy but you think michael jordan's really cool he's got something he's worried about he's got he's something scared about um actually i was just listening to uh oprah's book what happened to you and if you haven't crossed paths with that you might really be interested in that it's a book about trauma but in that book she's talking about how everybody she interviewed from presidents and prime ministers all the way through to you know local you know street workers they all finish the interview and say how do i do there are everybody seeking approval now oprah's maybe somebody that everybody seeks approval from i mean not not me personally unless you're listening oh i'll talk but um but my point is this there's a universal fear in in this entire in this entire you know client set from executive coaching and advisory work that i've been doing the last eight years and what i'm seeing is somebody saying what can i say how do i show up if and if the ceo is scared about putting their own message out there they're going to be real scared about their reps putting messages out there so how do we get that through that fear right the ceo is worried about the next round of funding and i know you you have a lot of ceo friends somebody who raises money everyone else in the building is excited the day that check clears except for the ceo who's worried about being written off by the vc who's worried about getting the call from doug landis because he's not growing fast enough i know doug's not an mcap anymore and we've made we've poked him enough on this show but they're worried about the vc reaching out and saying tell me what your target is now that we gave you the money and i don't think he would disagree with that as much as i should have brought him into this but um but that's what they're worried about that's what that ceo gets worried about um what is it you know navy seals someday get told they can't be navy seals anymore now they got to go figure out how to get a job how to write a resume you know i worked with a guy who was uh doing maritime operations taking the hardest shots there are to take and he was like how'd you get so good at writing resumes and i told him that's really simple i've been trying to convince myself i'm worthy since i started working and he goes yeah me too in a different way right like he's been trying to earn the trust of teammates he's been trying to do right for for the causes do right for the nation and and and there's something that is on a parallel to that uh even if you know your job of like hey how do i go keep this get this job then keep this job yeah well and i think there's a universal i was i did a podcast a little while ago on the topic of imposter syndrome right because i get it all the time and i'm like literally still to this day no matter how quote unquote big my brand is i sit at a table with cro's people you know those type of things million dollar companies i'm like jesus christ like this person's fucking way smarter way bit whatever but you know within five ten minutes of being there i'm like okay like they're all normal people but that imposter syndrome what was interesting that made me feel better about it was um was there's a reason for it right because if you feel imposter syndrome it's it's because you reached a level that you haven't been at yet and so therefore inherently once you reach that level you feel like an imposter because you've never been there before and then you sit there for a little while so if you don't feel imposter syndrome it it means you're probably not growing and i i like that reframe because i was like okay i could see that right where it's like hey you know i haven't sat at this table yet so i don't know what this table looks like so i don't i feel like an imposter but now i've been at the table a couple times i get it but then the next table i'm sitting at is like oh shit okay this person you know what i mean like but you know to your point earlier it's like we all face the same problems we all have the same fears we all you know what i mean we all try to you know live the same life and for the most part and the empathy i think is everybody kind of puts all these other people at a pedestal even as a rep you know you're looking up at a sea like oh i'm sorry to bother you type of bullshit you got some some value to say and you and you believe in what you sell i think that's the thing that i've found a lot is is i don't really think a lot of the sales reps that i work with genuinely believe in what they sell um like because it's just it's a software it's a it's a this it's a whatever who cares and that's the part that i think is the shame because once you believe man it's a it's it's transferring that enthusiasm it's being curious it's all that stuff but if you don't believe you're just a fucking sheister sales rep trying to make some cash what's tough is there so let's talk about there's there's two groups here i know that your audience is split with a lot of sales reps and a handful of leaders who are who have to look after this same challenge what happens as a leader if i don't believe in the product what happens as a leader when i come out of the product meeting and i know that i wasn't heard by the product leader when i said this is what our clients want they blew that off and now my next meeting my three o'clock is to try to rally my troops on the on the sales side right they know i don't believe in it right they know i'm full of shit so how do you how do you how do you deal with that and so one thing that i found um is that the faster i can take a rep through an entire sales cycle with a client the less it became about me convincing them the product was good i have to do a little bit of that when i'm selling or recruiting somebody right but once that they are joined the team my speed to value on getting a rep active is see having them see the entire sales process and so what that'll be is it mock calls with with reps on the team if if i don't have active calls but if you start on a day that there is an sdr book discovery call or whatever we're calling it now but if there's an sdr discovery call booked and that's happening on the floor you're sitting in on that or you're listening to an active recording on course or gong or whatever tools tools are happening right because i want you to hear that and i want you to go okay that's it what's your next meeting your next meeting is to hear what that second demo look like or whatever you know whatever stage is i want you to see the entire thing all the way through i'm going to record a negotiation call i'm not going to have you jump in on a zoom especially if you're training virtually i'm not going to throw off the dynamic but i do want you to hear the thing all the way through i do want you to feel like you can be you know interested in critical of the rep well why they say this why they say that um i do want you to feel like you're engaged because this is your new team so you can offer a perspective i think that that piece is really cool if you see the whole thing through then you also hear somebody say i want this i'm buying this here are my terms and after you hear that it's no longer can the vp of sales convince you that this product is the best thing since sliced bread what's happening is i just heard for myself this is a client of this type of company this is what they bought but that rep leads with two things one a knowledge of what the customer wants but two they leave with a deal story so let's say day two is hey i'm going to throw you the wolves you know i'm gonna make you do a bunch of cold calls you can book me a meeting you know that's sort of like dare you to be good at sales like i hope that that's gone but if it's still around and let's say that's what you do in day two that sales rep tries to go book that meeting and and the guy goes tell me why i should meet with you let's say it's one of your outreach guys that you're working with last week tell me why i shouldn't should meet with you and and the response is well don't take my word for it just yesterday i met uh x y and z level leader at a company that was this i'm i'm not at liberty to tell you who that is because it's not my account but i can tell you here is the needs here's the pain how they're thinking about pain hopefully you're taking a page from back around describing uh pain versus uh you know the the problem right like i'm actually like here's the pain that caused this problem and this is the problem they're trying to fix and they're going to solve that with us i don't know if you'll solve that with us or not and frankly this is my second day day at work but if you want to meet with me and i'm going to bring a colleague in and we can talk about x and y is it is it whatever whatever is on the list i think that i think that that can be a way to get through some of that just fake it because here's here's my pet pee with fake it till you make it i don't like i don't i've stopped saying that a long time ago because i don't believe it anymore yeah but john if you fake it till you make it when you make it you can't celebrate because you already told everybody you were there yeah yeah that's true i like that right so even if it's the most superficial thing i've always wanted to own a porsche or whatever i'm not picking on porsche drivers but let's say i always wanted to own a porsche and i told everybody i had one i rent one every time i'm in the bay area to make it look like i'm a successful consultant and then finally someday the company hits the number i buy myself my spiff i go buy myself that cherry red 911 or whatever i've been dreaming about day i can't post and say look what i've got now no because i've been telling you i had it for the last three years yeah and i mean insert whatever actually you know connects and matters to you but but that's why fake it to make it doesn't work how about that from a leadership standpoint you know there's there's this scene in u571 or something like that with matt mcconaughey where it all goes to shit he's the second something i watched the other day you were talking about green lights green lights is the fucking best book you've ever read personally um huge fan of them sorry i didn't mean to derail you so no no tell me the scene owner playing bongos like that's my dream if i could be him i'd be fucking psyched but anyways um you know he has he been on the show yet no god i've been trying what is he waiting for i i've reached out to him a few times he's a hard man to get in touch with though i actually went i took one of his courses like his live like motivational things because i was trying to find an angle to get in there um but i haven't gotten him yet he's on the list though i'm sure there's somebody listening who has an idea for you on how to prospect in this might be the time you can impress john barrows with your prospecting strategy or or find a way to exchange that lead for some kind of value from uh jb's anyway sorry i i drilled you from a leadership in this movie and he was it was actually i don't know if it was a navy seal but he was in it you five seven one or five four seven whatever it was it's a submarine and the captain of the sub like dies right matt mcconny is the second in command and it's all shits like and he and the and his crew looks at him and he says they're like what do we do and he's like i have no idea you know what i mean and in that moment like the crew is basically like fuck you know so everybody went all over the place how what level of trans and and let's look at me uh last year 2023 business fucking fell apart i was i thought as transparent as i could be i'm like this is what's going on this is what the plan is and i didn't i didn't say you know we'll figure like i don't know i figured like we will figure this out from your perspective though how much from a leadership standpoint based on all the you know executives you've worked with what's the line of instilling confidence that i got this as a leader and we will figure this out when you really are looking at it going holy shit like the world is blowing up around me and if i tell everybody around about this it's going to be mutiny people are going to be running away if they really know the truth here but i don't know what to do so from your standpoint where have you seen good leaders lead when they don't know what the fuck is going on or what to do it's really easy to see the germ the most dramatic story the big layoff the big reduction everybody home for covid uh your situation sorry you had to go through that but your your situation is an example of something we've seen in a lot of startups um i've had to lay people off because the funding round was late i've also had to hire people that i knew weren't going to be at the company longer than a year i without being able to tell them that that doesn't feel fucking good that feels the opposite of good it's it is not good um and and and it sucks the way i would get through this these more dramatic moments is by putting some chips in the bank with the less dramatic moments so here here's an example i when i'm hiring somebody i like to tell them like hey this is my job this is your job right um my job is to make sure that your next job is here because that means you're growing and the company is growing and that's what i'm going to work towards and i'm going to try to pay you fairly today with a deal that you're going to grow into it think sdr coming in a right here's what i need to do as an sdr i don't need to go get a hundred meetings the thousand meetings a month like i don't care about that i need you to be consistent because consistency is what i'm hiring for in the ae job when i move you from sdr to ae i'm going to double your base salary most likely i mean depends there depends on some mechanics but but let's say that was the deal and it's like i'm going to go make that really worth it to you financially but here are the things that that i need to do is i need to keep growing the company i can't do that with sdr without sdr appointment that's one little piece of honesty right somebody who asked me in that interview like hey what what are you raising the next round i don't know that's not my job as a vp of sales well can i meet the ceo and ask them that let's back up what question are you actually asking how much is our runway you don't actually isn't as a young seller or even as a sales leader you don't actually need to see the cap table you think you want that because you read the blog or you listen to my first million podcasts something like that and i'm glad that you're interested there are a bunch of other signals that are way more interesting than the cap table date since last funding super interesting most people don't and you know what while we're talking about funding like the easiest hack to that is just go read venture deals by brad feld and you know every company selling 20 of their company if they're on the venture route they're selling 20 of the company per round and it's about 24 months to 12 months depending on on what the cycle is for fundraising so call it 18 months so every 18 months there's gonna be a fundraising round and you're going to lose 20 of whatever value they offered you in stock so your question is can i forex this business so that my stock is worth it you don't actually care about how many shares you get right but it's hard to think like that so what i want to do to answer your question of what do you do in those really dramatic times is make the make those payments early here's another one i learned this one from my my old boss shresh khano when we were at addroll he did a really good job of framing like uh the commitments we had to each other on the sales team and um he basically wrote down three or four like core principles on the sales team and he you know he delivered those you know in a meeting hey everybody this is what it means to be on the sales team we're growing i want to go back to this three or four times he went back to that hey everybody we've added a lot of new faces here many of you have seen this slide before i threw it in threw in this old gym because i want to make sure we're all on the same page our goal is to be the best place to work that means that even though we've got a shitty office we had a really bad location on mission street we're going to make it really nice inside we're going to have each other's backs and this is going to be a great place for you to start your sales career that that was one of the values another value was no deal is worth your reputation and i loved hearing shresh say that because that really aligned with me personally and made it easier for times when i may not have believed in what we were doing but i believed in the relationship and that me and that was easier right so as a leader hearing those things i was like okay i got it and i got marching orders from the boss right we'll check it out so when things got hard we had an issue where we had to readjust the comp plan things were really hard so my best sellers lost money but they were at the top of the stack and i had to go sit down before he announced the change to the to the to the comp plan he put up the same slide that was the fourth time some of these people had seen that slide fifth and six for some and it's on there and he goes we're going to be the best place to work that means we have to change comp so that's true for everybody or that's true for the most amount of the team and once we're on that same page it made it a lot easier to have that conversation right and then there were some things we couldn't be completely transparent about but there are also some things we could we could sit people down and say look you've been with me three years i need to be honest with you this is what's happening for you and your comp and if you're going somewhere else i'm going to be the first one out there to do your recommendation if you give me a chance i think you're going to make it up because here's how it's going to balance out and the rep that i had to have that conversation with we are still friends today and it's going on you know 15 years you know so like it so you can do that so those dramatic moments and you're talking about some really big ones but um i've never been in the position where you lose the chief when you're driving a sub um that sounds pretty scary but being honest with people about what scares you what doesn't scare you in a time that's less dramatic increases that intimacy so there's trustworthiness i love it and you hit on something also that i think is key is just is expectation setting you know i i genuinely believe that life is about expectation setting i say this all the time where if you think of the last time you were pissed off about anything pick it i don't care what it is i almost guarantee it's because your expectations were miss set right time of the flight time of the flight traffic like you know two o'clock in the afternoon here in boston i figure i'll just pop down the street and you know go get some whatever and i'm jam-packed in traffic i'm like anybody fucking work anymore what the fuck right that type of thing but if i'm doing it at 7 30 in the morning or 5 30 at night it's like yeah yeah it's traffic it sucks so i think it a lot of this has to do especially with with funded companies i do not understand why executives try to hide the fact that they're going for ipo that they're going for an acquisition that they're going for because you can get people to do so much more if they if they know where they fit and the expectations are clear because if i'm just like hey look this is two years in and out the goal is to sell this fucker so we got to get to this point but if you come in here i'm going to align you here and we're all on the same page and then who knows what's going to happen after two years but that's the goal i will you know and by the way if you don't want to be on this train that's okay transition out but this is the way it is and and so few leaders i think are are willing to set clear expectations let people know what the direction is share the vision of what they really want to do not the bullshit vision that they put up on their fucking whiteboard but the real one of what they're trying to accomplish and i think if you do that that's all people are looking for it's just i just need to know where i stand and i need to know where i'm going yeah i i'd agree with you that's something that people are looking for that's tough because i've never been a venture-backed ceo so i don't know what it's like to be able to stand up there and say this is where we're going this is what where we're doing but i do know that the venture-backed ceos that i've worked with when they have an open and honest conversation about their expectations and they have an open on conversation about where they've fallen down and they have a chance to see the team have their back it becomes a lot easier to say hey guys this is this is a goal you know for them to ask the team you know there is one pressure that came up that i never saw as an operator when i was when i was a sales rep working the company i never really understood a particular pressure that's on venture-backed ceos and i don't know if you've you've heard this but um there's a stage where that ceo has to show that they can hire an executive from outside the company where they have to it's almost bragging rights i got the vp of marketing from salesforce and even though that's true about some companies i work with i'm not talking about anyone specifically here just to be clear for anyone listening but um or i got the um the head of legal from twitter or whatever and i'm making stuff up but like they have to be able to say that they have to be able to point to those things and they have to be able to say say look you know i'm i'm building the right team and some of those moves means that they have to say to they have to kind of do the fake team make it on the recruiting side i think that there's a better way uh where you can be honest and do that but i also haven't been there myself where you know i mean i almost i was telling the kids the other day that i almost moved to boston john i don't know if i ever told you this story i almost moved to boston with a wife that was like seven months pregnant i came out there to interview for my first vp of sales job i knew that i wanted to be the vp of sales from series a to series b because i'd seen sure i stood at ad roll and a few months after ad rolls series b happened i was at drinks and dinner with the ceo that i really respected who's from boston i thought his market was really interesting we got into a conversation he said you should come out for an interview and i got to do the full executive enema interview i met everybody i spent time there uh actually a guy i knew from high school is in um he's a town planner for one of the suburbs that that's like just north of of downtown i i'll get the names wrong maybe brookline is that a thing that brookline yeah so i think i think ethan's from brookline or or nearby and so he had been a town planner and so he drove us around we looked for houses he taught us about the neighborhoods and told us which infrastructure was the best and and we we house shopped we're moving we're ready to go and um i didn't get the job and i got um i got some feedback on why and one piece of feedback was was spot on and the other piece of feedback was totally made up i'm sure of it and uh later on i became friends with the person who did get the job and so i asked them i was like hey you know and she's like yeah and i know but our relationship is outside of that okay and so we're having a drink and we're talking about it and what i what i came to realize is that a company where you're not totally sure what the next step is the right leader is putting a team in place that's ready for that so the feedback that was accurate which was my kind of ability to do math you know it was around p and l uh and and managing the the the pro forma of what the sales team would need to do that part was right i think that that ceo was uncertain at how the fundraising was going to go and whether or not i was going to be able to stand the test of that interview process the part that was a little bit bs-y was also fair too because that ceo needed to have enough reason to knock me out of the process because where i was in life was at a place where he didn't want to take the risk but he didn't want to take the risk in building the company that couldn't support young vp of sales who moves here with a pregnant wife i don't think that that's discriminatory for anybody who thinks that that is and it's fair if you do and you're like dude i would never hold that on him he's building the company and taking the risk that he feels comfortable with that was a risk he wasn't comfortable with i fully support that decision and my life turned out just fine even though my expectations led to a little bit of suffering in the short term and i was a little bit bummed um i could have learned from that situation quicker but what what i did learn was that the right ceos are are standing on a principle and that is really cool to see that and to me that's where you know going through the value exercise i tell everybody that right now it's like if you are wondering where your next job is what your next challenge you know and you're not happy with where you are forget about looking for the next job because until you look internally and you look at yourself and you really take a hard look at those true core values of yours like what do they really mean to you you're you're going to keep like going after jobs because they sound sexy or whatever it is but man once you match a company a leader or whatever it is that shares your core values then the world opens wide up right there's not enough people who are doing the values work and and and if you're somebody who's stuck on the okay how do i figure out my values i would say start with amy bolis's scorecard uh which i'm sure you've you haven't seen that one no i had my own scorecard like i created my own version of it but uh because i went through it so deal scorecard yeah awesome yeah i actually go back to a lot of the stuff i learned from you about deal management on the scorecard the one that looks like a golf scorecard that's a you still teaching that one absolutely because i think it's i think it's you know i love it yeah i'd love for you to to put it out there more so i can point to public resources when it comes up the um the what i'm talking about is the the scorecard of hiring a vp of sales and the scorecard of getting that first vp of sales job and so if you haven't had amy volis on well i've got it yeah no i absolutely love it so make her talk to you about that the next time you have her on because the idea of running a scorecard for your own your own hiring process would be one that you maybe even you guys should compare notes on your scorecards but what i think is really valuable is the deciding what you would need to take this job well how come when the company which is going to be if you venture back you're going to be a new company every three months even if their job title or your company didn't change right there's dynamics that change there's new people hired there's new processes new systems there's new resources there's new resource constrictions there's new markets things move pretty fast run that process every three months to see if you would take this job if it happened today what would need to be true for you to thrive in this job even though your expectations have changed in the last six months doing that work on a regular basis does two things one it increases the level of honesty you have for yourself and it helps you get a lot of that nonsense out of the way and and you know what go ahead and mourn some of that scar tissue of you know you were promised a team of a hundred now you can only grow to 20 no offense to anybody that's happened to but now you got to decide are you taking that job today are you still going to do it did you have any control over pandemic uh vacy funding um whether the company got merged what i mean you don't have any control over these things so let's take a bet on yourself or realize that you're not set up to keep betting on yourself and you've run out of chips okay that sucks but i'm glad you know it now and you heard it here instead of finding out because someone else told you yeah you know the company you came and trained me i got to tell you this quick story if you've never heard it and even though i'm uh we are going to talk your year off if you let me but um when you came out and trained our team you know i was at a company where uh things right after that the the work was good but the math was wrong so i'm not asking for a refund on the training the training was great the team was doing great but the overall company's math was off and meaning the person we're selling to the icp wasn't paying enough to justify the resources that took to go close the deal yep no because we hadn't done the right cpa work um the cost per acquisition work and we hadn't we hadn't truly understood what that account meant and i went to go see i used to work for a cfo uh in sales i was in sales working for the cfo and so i went to go see him peter krivkovic at Adderall and uh we had a drink and sat down and i told him what was going on and there was a pause a sip and he goes sorry i gotta be the one to tell you this but it's either you or your boss someone's getting fired it's probably you and it's soon but it's okay i'm here i'm gonna talk you through what's next and that was exactly what i needed bro like when peter sat me down and said you are going to be fired these are the things that you need to understand he helped me understand the business he started this conversation on business acumen made me help me understand the business he helped me understand the motivations of the leaders at the company even though he'd never met them before he had helped me prepare for how to have that conversation to go do something else so that i could leave on my terms and i moved from a director role to a vp role partly because of the stuff that peter helped me understand and that next job was i go to the boardroom type of job and that was really cool uh who never would have happened without that kind of tough love you're about to be fired because this math is wrong well how did the rest of us go have the love and faith in each other to be that honest right that's beyond radical candor yeah that is like the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me was to say the thing that i least wanted to hear yep it's tough and i think that's where you know that's the part it's even you know you look at your friends you know what i mean where it's like you got a buddy who you know is dating a girl or whatever it is and you know she's terrible but he's all in on her or whatever it is and it's like you know it's wrong how about we go they're terrible for each other but there you go because their their chemical reaction when they're in the room is it positive another way of putting it yes they're terrible for each other but you know blinded because she probably needs to hear it too let's be totally right but it's like having that conversation you risk losing your friend because yeah maybe five years down the road they're going to be like you know what dude you were right but five years from now like that when so it's really hard to have those conversations with people i actually when i worked for jack welsh for a couple of months um you know his whole top grading right uh like and everybody thinks he's so draconian for that and i asked him about it i was like jack like everybody just rips you apart for being he's like can i just paint the picture here for you he goes say you have an average worker who's below you know slightly below average or whatever it is but you're too chicken shit to have the conversation with them so every every year you give them a decent performance review they think they're doing okay whatever right so they're they're feeling good about themselves and their job because they got a job whatever it is and then layoffs come and everybody knows layoffs start from the bottom and they move their way up so all of a sudden you take somebody for five ten fifteen years who has been in this job mediocre at best and you have been scared to have the real conversation with them that they're not that good at this but they could be good at something else and then all of a sudden you come to them and you say sorry you're fired they're going to have an inferiority conflict they're going to be like wait a minute i thought i was fucking good at my job now i was doing good now my whole self-worth is all over the place whereas instead you come to somebody and say look you don't suck in general you just suck at this i'm going to cut the cord here so you can go find what you're great at he's like which one's worse dragging somebody out for an extended period of time and then having them did not know what their real self-worth is or being very honest and very direct with somebody and saying look you're not good here it doesn't mean you suck in general it just means you suck at this this is not your path go find your path like that to me is a far better conversation but nobody's willing to have it these days i got one of those conversations coming at me when i was when i was selling and the prospect had to have that conversation with me he said i can tell ryan you're not meant for this he did it when my colleague was up at the bar getting the next round whoa and so we didn't get to finish that conversation yeah he and i are still friends there you go that level of honesty connects us which is so if you take nothing else from this conversation like hopefully it is trustworthiness is about connection connection only comes with taking this risk whether it's a prospect or a colleague or a friend who needs to hear it yep yeah man well like you said i think we could keep i mean it was funny i didn't even i didn't even intro this to like usually i'm like hi ryan what's going on what's a little background what's going on i was like that fucking thank god i hit record or else we would have been like oh shit so we've been talking the whole time well i'm eager to catch up with you whenever and uh you know give me a few months and let's do an episode on what we can do around content marketing because people need to hear it yeah and i think what you're doing too is like having the story told like i think that's so many people need to tell their story right now it's it's insane um i don't know why more people don't because it's the easier thing to do is just not how smart you are but tell your story just your journey because you never know when somebody's listening and i actually put this out to finish this up i put this out recently where you know the reason i do a podcast the reason i did put social and all these different things is because literally you never know when somebody's listening and it could change their perspective on something and you know i had i had one kid come up to me and i don't know if you were i've told the story before but he said hey john you know can i give you a hug and i'm like sure i'm a hug you know so an event like i'm a hugger who are you yeah right so i give the kid a hug and he's like you know uh i just want to say thank you i'm like for what he's like you saved my life and i'm like come on man save your life i don't even fucking know you you know whatever he's like no no you don't understand he's like remember when you were going through your dad like your dad passed away and you were talking about it and you were posting about it and sharing like like all the struggles he's like i i listened and and and no joke like i still get teared up thinking about this the kid um his mom died his brother his mom died expected like she had cancer or something like that so he's expecting that but on the same day his brother died and on this and then and then his uh wife left him and his company fired him for taking too much bereavement all in one month i'm like what and he was literally living in his car and contemplating suicide and somehow he came across my podcast and was listening to how i was dealing with my grief and he's like you know what i i can do this i can get through this and he's like now i got a girlfriend and back on my feet i got my job and i was like i i mean honestly right if you're teaching resilience if if teaching how to find that resilience if not a single person ever listens to my podcast again or i get zero more sponsor dollars for the rest of that fucking pod this podcast life it's still worth it a thousand percent for that one example which is why i tell people tell your fucking story because you never know there's somebody behind you or dealing with something that you were dealing with that might look at that and say oh maybe i can get out of this or whatever it is so it's it's almost criminal not to tell your story in a lot of ways and it's the easiest thing to do because you don't have to make it up yeah so uh well thank you again for having me of course man i appreciate you making it happen for so many years love it um tell people where they can find out more we'll get into we will catch up and talk about all the details what you're doing now but give them give a quick synopsis and then where can people find out more about what you're doing yeah so i'm on linkedin it's just simple linkedin slash j ryan williams yep um and i'm also running a company called anteater so anteater dot media take you to our website where we're talking with ceos about how they can tell their story identify what to say and where to say it so they can fill revenue pipeline through short form content there you go and so uh it's just that simple and those are places people can find me and i'm i'm down to connect or share resources however however it's helpful other man well we gotta we gotta find a chance to grab a beer and uh catch up in person one of these days so all right my travels i look forward to it love it bro all right brother all right hey everybody thank you so much for coming on and hopefully enjoy this conversation as much as i did like i say all the time at the end of all these podcasts go out there and make somebody smile today because no matter how bad your day is going or you think it went you go out and make somebody smile you know you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now so thank you all very much and i will see you on the other side hey everyone i hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as i did with your support and our incredible guests we're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now and i can't thank you enough now to keep the momentum going it would mean the world to me if you could go and leave a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform and share some of your favorite episodes with your network also i am super excited to be launching my new newsletter where i'll be sharing everything i know and everything i'm learning along the way while i'm out there selling every day just like you go to jbarrows.com newsletter to sign up today let's all level up and make this happen together