Episode 64: Selling With Noble Purpose With Sales Guru Lisa Earle McLeod
Lisa McLeod
Lisa McLeod is the global expert on purpose-driven business. She is the author of five books, including her bestseller: Selling with Noble Purpose: How to Drive Revenue and Do Work That Makes You Proud.
Lisa has spent two decades helping leaders increase competitive differentiation and emotional engagement. She developed the Noble Purpose methodology after her research revealed, that salespeople who sell with Noble Purpose, outsell salespeople who focus on targets and quotas.
Lisa is a former Procter & Gamble Sales Leader who founded her own firm, McLeod & More, Inc. in 2001. She helps leaders at organizations like Cisco, Roche, Volvo, and Dave & Busters drive exponential revenue growth. Lisa has keynoted in 25 countries and authored over 2,000 articles. She has made appearances on the Today Show and the NBC Nightly News, and her firm’s work has been featured in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR.
Lisa ranks in at #3 in the Top Global Sales Gurus of 2023 and continues to be a top thought leader in the world of sales. Her new leadership book, Leading with Noble Purpose: How to Create a Tribe of True Believers is a breakthrough book that shows leaders how to win the hearts and minds of their teams and customers.
Most people think of sales in terms of hard skills but not as something that can be done with a purpose. Sales guru Lisa Earle McLeod found in her career that sales professionals who sell with a sense of higher purpose tend to be a lot more successful than those who only focus on closing deals. She has gathered all the insight she has acquired over the years and condensed them into a compelling work called “Selling with Noble Purpose.” This book moves away from the “tried and true” principles of sales and elevates the profession into a purpose-driven, impact-focused endeavor. Join the conversation as Lisa walks us through the genesis of the book and what it teaches us about the sales profession of today.
---
Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Selling With Noble Purpose With Sales Guru Lisa Earle McLeod
Lisa McLeod is a global expert on purpose-driven business. She's the author of five books, including her bestseller, Selling With Noble Purpose: How To Drive Revenue And Do Work That Makes You Proud, which we are going to get into. Lisa has spent two decades helping leaders increase competitive differentiation and emotional engagement. She developed the Noble Purpose Mythology after her research revealed that salespeople who sell with a noble purpose outsell salespeople who focus on targets and quotas.
Lisa is a former proctor and gamble sales leader who founded her own firm, McLeod & More, Inc. in 2001. She helps leaders at organizations like Cisco, Roche, Volvo, and Dave & Buster’s drive exponential revenue growth. Lisa has keyed in 25 countries and authored over 2000 articles. She has made appearances on the Today Show and the NBC Nightly News and her firm's work has been featured in Forbes, the Wall Street Journal and NPR.
On top of all of that, Lisa is not only included in the global guru list as a top sales guru, but she clocks in at the number three sales guru in the world. I have been fortunate enough to meet Lisa. She is the number one sales guru because I not only enjoy her as a person, but I'm a huge fan of her approach to sales. I'm ecstatic to get into this conversation. I am excited to welcome Lisa to the show.
I love it, and I love the name.
I love the book much. Why I like it is I feel like you articulate things that I've always felt, but I've never had them put into words. I've never had anyone tell me it in the way that you deliver it, and I'm excited that you're here.
Thank you. Your reaction matches the research because the research tells us the top 10% of sellers have this innate sense of purpose. They truly want to make a difference to their customers. Now they want to close deals and make money, but their driver is wanting to make a difference to customers. Customers can feel it and that's why they're the top performers. What's interesting is after we did this research to identify that people like you were like, “That's what I always thought. I want to win the top sales award,” but when you talk to them and say, “Tell me about my customer,” your customer don't go, “This one is $10,000. This one is $1 million.” They go, “Let me tell you about their business.” What we found was that it was teachable. It might not be innate to everyone else the way it is to that top 10%, but it's something you can teach and it will drive performance.
The top 10% of sellers have an innate sense of purpose. They truly want to make a difference to their customers.
I appreciate that. You see it's dogeared. I met you. I had you sign it. You saw how much I loved it.
“I was excited. Can you sign my book? I was like, “Yeah.”
It was great. You share an origin story. I would love it if you wouldn't mind sharing how you have this light bulb a-ha moment connecting purpose to performance.
Go back about many years, a lot of people talk about purpose now, but this is some of the origins of where it started. I had been in sales, I'd been a VP of sales, sales consultant and sales trainer. I was running my own company. This client, a biotech company, asked my team and I to assess their sales team and identify what differentiated the top performers. This is interesting. If you spend any time in sales, you know the difference between a good performer and a bad performer is a pretty readily identical set of skills. The good performers know their product. They make prospecting calls. They have in-depth conversations with customers.
They ask good questions. These are teachable skills. We know what they are. What's harder to put your finger on is what's the difference between the good and the exceptional. It shows up in the numbers, but like, “What is that thing?” That's what this company wanted us to identify. Because they were a science-based company, they had us do it as a blind study. Meaning, we went out in the field to work with their people and we didn't know who was who. We weren't with any poor performers, everyone was either good like 60% or 70% or exceptional. We didn't know who the exceptional people were.
The thought was that we could maybe spot something that they were missing. We go out in the field. We work with all these salespeople. How long did they talk to the customer? How many questions did they ask? What were their backgrounds? We did some in-depth interviews to see their backgrounds. It was all in search of that seemingly elusive thing. What makes the top performers the top performers? We are near the end of the study. I was with a representative in Phoenix, Arizona, and I was about to get out of her car.
It's funny how these single moments of your life and everything click in place. I was about to get out of her car. She dropped me out of the airport and it's hot outside in Phoenix. I've got on a suit. I know it's going to be hot. I was sitting there at the air conditioning and I asked her a question, there was not a list. I said, “What do you think about when you go on sales calls?” She got emotional. She described this patient. She said, “I was early in my career at this company. I met this patient. She was a grandmother type. She came up to me in the waiting room and asked me if I was the rep for our drug and my name badge.”
She said, “The little lady talked to her about, ‘I'm grateful since my doctor gave me this drug. I can get on a plane. I can fly across the country, I can visit my grandkids.’” This sales rep in this very suited-up, buttoned-up scientific business environment is getting emotional as she's telling me this. I found myself emotionally listening. She said, “That's why I do this job. She's my higher purpose. I think about her every day. When I don't feel like making cold calls, I think about her. Challenging customer? I think about her.”
I got out of the car, on the plane, flew the long way back to Atlanta and I kept turning it over and over in my mind. What I kept thinking was, “Is this the thing we've been looking for?” It's not, “How many questions did they ask? How good was their product knowledge?” All those things will get you to good, you need those. Is this thing, this underpinning, this emotional, psychological construct called purpose the differentiator? I go back through all the interviews and I found four other reps who alluded to it. One talked about his dad being a doctor. One wants to make the doctor slide better. At the end of the study, the company said, “Who do you think our top representatives are?” I said, “I think it's these five.” I was a 100% right.
When you talk about the emotional piece to it and the science, I think people think sales is this hard skill. You are talking about the soft skills but almost quantifying them and putting your finger on them. That is what's mind-blowing to me.
I knew that I saw something and I knew that it was the differentiator because keep in mind I was not coming to this blind. by that point, I'd watched tens and thousands of sales calls because I'd been a field sales coach. I'd trained thousands of people. It crystallized in my mind, “That's it. That's the thing.” I tell them, “It's these five.” The next question is, “How do you know?” My genius completely evaporates and I totally blow the rest of the meeting because I go to a bunch of scientists I say, “They had a different story in their hearts.” They're like, “What?” I couldn't quite language it at the moment, but I knew that I had seen something and if we could codify and teach it, it'd be magic.
Selling with Noble Purpose: How to Drive Revenue and Do Work That Makes You Proud
I wrote the first edition of the book not long after that, then in the ensuing years we've since gotten better at how to scale it because of what we now know, and it was obvious in this environment where this little lady, grandmother and she can fly across the country. It was that obvious. I will tell you since that time we have also done this in a concrete company and in a plumbing company. You might think, “Where's the purpose there?” You try living your life without concrete or plumbing.
We've done it with software companies because at the end of the day, if people are buying what you're selling, it's improving their life in some way. The mistake that companies make is they often come up with this very sanitized value prop and they think that if they can train their sellers to repeat it to customers, then that's the magic. That's better than not having a value prop. That's better than your salespeople not knowing it. That will take you to good.
If people are buying what you're selling, it's improving their life in some way.
If you want to get too exceptional, you have to take it to the next level. That is embedding this deep emotional understanding into your reps of how your offering makes a difference. Not a generic value prop but your version of the grandmother because what I learned and saw as I studied it more was when she has that clarity in her sight line, two things are happening. 1) She has an emotional connection. It's not some boring value prop on a slide. She is personally and emotionally invested. That is the, “Get out of bed,” on a hard day. There's been lots of studies since it increases resilience and all these things. The other thing that's happening is it's translating to higher-level skills.
The thing we always try and teach in sales is we'll always tell our salespeople, “Be more curious. Ask better questions.” If I'm here to show you my value prop, I might ask questions. I might do the ones I was taught in training. I might try and find out about your business because I know I'm supposed to. If I'm here psychologically because I want to and truly help you and I believe there's a high probability that I can, it shifts the psychological center of the sales call from me to you. A value prop, the psychological center of the sales call is on the seller. When you have this noble purpose, the center is on the customer. Those noble purpose sellers ask better questions. They are more curious and emotively the customers can feel, “I'm here to help you win.” The customers open up more.
When you have a noble purpose, the center is on the customer. And so noble purpose sellers ask better questions. They are more curious.
What a great way to differentiate yourself from your competitors. If you're showing up focused on that emotional piece of their needs and what fuels them. I like the Find Your Grandmother story. I'm going to use that. When you said, “Where’s your grandma when you show up for this?” It is a very easy way to understand the shift. I would love to hear from you maybe a two-part question. Can you give a formal definition of what is noble purpose? How can we start to find our own for our own businesses and our own roles?
Your noble purpose is how you make a difference to customers. A lot of people have these big lofty purpose statements, “We are going to do this for our customer. We're going to do this for our shareholders and our communities.” Those are all fine and well. I'm talking about what drives sales behavior, innovation and organizational alignment. That is one simple thing, “How do you make a difference to your customers? How do you impact them?” Not, “They have the benefit of our services.”
The question is, and we teach this in our sales training or sales coaching, “How is the customer different as a result of doing business with you?” That is the driving question of your business and that also needs to be the driving question of your sales activity in your coaching, “How do you find your own noble purpose?” It's the answer to three questions, “How do you make a difference? How do you do it differently than your competition? On your best day, what do you love about your job?” I will give you two examples of purpose statements that sound the same but are vastly different.
There was a great article in the Harvard Business Review and you know how they'll have like a theme, then they'll do a bunch of different articles on the theme It was on purpose. It was on Mars versus Purina. They talked about how they had similar sounding purpose statements and Purina PetCare and Mars Petcare. Mars is going to tackle this 150 years feeding cattle on planes. Purina's statement was better with pets. Mars' statement was to create a better world for pets. One of those is a slogan that goes on T-shirts. The other is a call to action.
Your purpose needs to be that call to action. Mars took on Purina and won. I would suggest that it's because they started with a different end game and the people who decided that had a different ethos and then a better world for pets means, “Where are pet suffering? What can we do differently for pets? It got them into pet health and this.” It drives the top thinking, the strategic North of your organization because if you're trying to make the strategic North of your organization increase market share, revenue and profitability, those are trailing indicators. They're not a strategy. They're benchmarks and numbers. They matter, but they're not a strategy.
We are going to make a better world for pets. That's going to spur some action. It spurs all this innovation and other things. Let's take it down to the micro. If I am the seller and you're a vet and I'm having a sales call on you, I can't just go in and go, “Look at our brochures, we're making a better role for pets.” I have to say, “Tell me about your patients, doctor. What are some of the challenges you're seeing with them? What are the biggest issues?” I am not just about this slogan better with pets like Purina. I am about this true North but I need to do it on the individual sales call. That's what gets lost with people.
They think that, “It needs to be a catchy slogan.” They think it needs to maybe sit at the executive level and make decisions. It needs to be in the individual sales call. It can't just be generic, “I'm here to help you with your business,” but like in the case of Mars, “I'm here with you to create a better world for pets.” That means the pets you are serving.
I have two a-ha moments listening to you debrief that. The first is I love the fact that we're talking about selling with a noble purpose but it goes beyond that because if you have the purpose at the organization level and I love your example of it opening up new revenue streams, how you show up to your clients, if you're talking to the vet, how is the pet, who's the grandma in this situation? What I love about it is it drives the whole organizational goals. I love you used true North. I use North Star. It's the same. one thing that I think when you talked about the Purina slogan, “Better for pets,” versus Mars, “We make a better world for pets,” to me, that's like a hard line in the sand of arrogance versus authenticity.
To be clear, theirs wasn't better for pets, it was better with pets. You made an error but was not an error of arrogance. It is a strategic error, “Better with pets is like life is better with pets. We love pets.” We are in a club. What does the club do? Isn't it interesting, we think words don't matter with and for? We changed it. You were correct in, “Better with Pets is about us.” Most companies’ purpose statements are, “We will deliver a return to shareholders. We will do this. We will do that.” They're still about them.
I'll give you an example of another company's purpose statement that was effective. Everyone thinks they need this lofty change, the world, the universe thing. It’s great if you've got it. We had one company that was an IT company that worked with small businesses. They handled your IT for small businesses. Their purpose was literally we help make small businesses more successful. It's clear and straightforward, they were a franchise organization. Even more needs to be clear. every franchisee your purpose to go out in this world and make small businesses more successful. If I'm a seller and I'm meeting with a small business, “I want to help make them more successful.” Back to what are the skills we always try and get salespeople to do that they never do when they leave the classroom?
Ask better discovery questions, show more curiosity, help the customer and understand the customer's goals. What I would submit is the reason that most salespeople don't do that is not because they're bad people. It's because their manager is in their ear saying, “Close it.” When we change and their manager is in their ear saying, “Your job is to help make these small businesses more successful.” I'm here to make you more successful, I got to know how you define success. I got to know what you're trying to do. I got to know what your pain points are. I got to know what your aspirations are.
What it does when you have that clarity is it helps the managers do better coaching because now we're coaching to customer impact. Revenue is the trailing indicator. You got to price yourself right, have margin and all that stuff. The reason people don't do value-based selling is that they've given a generic value prop and a manager's in their ear saying, “Close it,” which forces the rep to think about themselves instead of saying, “Find out how you can make these people be more successful.”
What's nice about that is from an individual seller's perspective, instead of remembering all the bells and whistles you learned in training, everything under the gauntlet, drink it through the fire hose. You have one thing to focus on.
It becomes the true north and everything else is in the service of that. I want to say something when you talk about how this drives innovation and competitive differentiation. In an ideal world when I work with clients, we are working with the CEO. We either create the purpose statement or they already have it. One of our best clients is Conrad Hilton. Many years ago, he said, “Our purpose is to fill the Earth with the light and warmth of hospitality.” They had it. What they've got to do is make that come alive with the guy selling meetings in Tideland and the Belman. Getting that, what is your part in that is what we were with them on. What I want to say is, that was ideal. CEO we're on board, we are doing training with every single person in the whole organization.
If you're an individual contributor and you're reading and say, “I can never get my CEO on board,” here's the good news. You don't have to. You don't need any help from them. If they are in your ear saying, “Close it,” it doesn't matter. What we saw in our research is you can be that top-tier seller who sits there. You answer those questions for yourself. How do I make a difference? How do I do it differently on my best day? What do I love about my job? You get your paragraph of the answers to that and you're good to go.
I love the book because it gives a nice structure and a roadmap. you give me of examples of how it works that you can remember. You also give a lot of framework in the way. To echo Lisa's statements, if you're an individual contributor, read this book. Let's talk a little bit about if you're a leader and you're trying to instill that because I think that our leaders are also getting it from their bosses.
CEO is getting it. Publicly traded companies don't care about my noble purpose. They care about quarterly earnings.
Where's the balance? What can leaders do to make sure that they're supporting their teams in selling the noble purpose?
I'll give you a little bit of overview. I'll give you one thing and it's super easy. The overview is you have to understand that revenue and profit are lagging indicators. They are the result of your product offering and all that, but your team's interactions with customers. If as a leader it's the measurement of your success and you are constantly hearing your team, “Revenue and profit,” you are like a coach trying to train a runner and constantly shouting their times at them.
Revenue and profit are lagging indicators. Your team's interactions with customers is the measurement of your success.
They will go a little bit faster when you're shouting at them, but they are not going to get to a consistent top-tier level unless you look at their conditioning and their training, start and stride. Those are the things. You cannot coach to revenue and profit any more than you can coach to a runner's times. I rarely use sports analogies. You picture this coach going, “Go faster.” That might work when you're on the sidelines at the Olympics and they might see your face, but if you haven't done all the other stuff, it's not going to work.
There’s no long-game strategy there.
What do you coach to? I'm going to give you a single question. If you're a leader, whether you're the VP of sales, CEO, Jane or Joe sales manager with two people, you ask this question when a deal is in play you say, “How will this customer be different as a result of doing business with us?” We call it the game-changing question.
The reason is your seller's ability to answer that question gives you insight into what value case they're presenting for the customer, what customer intelligence they have, and how deep they've gone, here's what we know with sales managers that we coach. If all your sellers know whether it's 2 or 2000, then I'm going to ask you when there is a deal on the table or if you're coming to me to try and get a lower price because I'm the one who has to approve that or if we're doing a pipeline review, you learn that every time I ask you, “How will this customer be different as a result of this deal?” what happens is you start to do better discovery.
The key that we're trying to get to, the behavior that we want from our sellers is the intent, “I'm here to make a difference. It leads me to more curiosity and deeper discovery, then I do this deeper discovery, then I'm able to link to higher-level objectives within the customer. When I link to higher-level objectives, I get further up the food chain, the customer. I make a better value case. I get to differentiated deals. It always comes down to price.” Everybody thinks, “My people need to be better negotiators because deals are coming down to price.” They might need some negotiation training but that's probably not where your problem is.
The reason it's coming down to price is because you don't have any differentiation. If you're a sales manager and you spend a lot of time coming up with this question, it's almost like emotional chess. You're trying to ask a question to get the seller's brain out of, “Am I going to make my bonus? Are you mad at me? Am I going to close it?” The usual sales manager questions are, “When are you going to close it? How much is it going to be? Who's the competition? Do you have all the decision-makers?” Good questions but none will reveal information that makes you more compelling.
As you walked us through that, thank you, I feel like you had said something earlier in the interview about translating to higher skills and it is interesting that framework of purpose and then the one question, “How will the client be different as a result of doing business with us?” Those are pretty easy to boil it down to those two things if you keep that as your focus.
Imagine taking us out of this world, at another world where they focus on lagging indicators, schools and test scores. I'm a parent, Google the test scores and decide where we're going to live. They're an indicator. We know that the overemphasis on test scores has eroded the love of learning and teacher engagement. Imagine a school where the teachers all meet every morning, Monday or whatever and they have enough baseline supplies. The kids are showing up to school well-fed.
We got the stuff to be good. Imagine that school, if every Monday, I, as the principal say, “We're going to get those test scores up,” versus a school where I say, “How are we creating informed citizens? How are we creating people that think?” As a teacher, one I'm going to be a hell of a lot more motivated, but 2) “I'm going to have a totally different set of lesson plans. I'm going to have a totally different set of thinking about each individual student.” If you don't have enough books or the kids haven't had enough food, that's a different issue. If you're reading this and you're that company, if your product is failing, you need to ask this question with product development.
Get the baseline survival skills done and then go for it. That is helpful because I think about that's where I obviously see why you're a global sales guru. I think everyone who's reading can understand it. You are helping facilitate a framework and how we can all work in an environment that we all enjoy more. It's coming from a place of human connection and authenticity. It's not pushing numbers. I's not pushing deals out. It's coming from a place where we all crave this no matter what type of leader you are, everyone craves this and you are giving us the tools to do it.
Once we get past food and shelter, human beings have two fundamental needs, belonging and significance, “I want to be part of something bigger than myself and I want my contribution to matter.” I want to be clear. When you introduced me, there were two things you talked about where my expertise is, emotional engagement and competitive differentiation. They are linked. They are connected. When I have this sense of belonging, what we're doing here matters. This work matters. I'm part of a team of people that's doing something different.
You might be doing concrete. We work with Dave & Buster’s. I love them. Their purpose is, “We champion, laugh out, loud, fun.” They are all about you coming, your life may suck, but for three hours it's going to be fun at Dave & Buster’s. This sense that we're doing something and the competitive differentiation is we're doing it differently and we're doing it better.
What's amazing is sometimes that differently and better is the sales team. Sometimes you may have a very similar product to your competitor, but because of the way your sales team interacts, they become the competitive differentiator. I say that because we've all been, including me, on the receiving end of, “We went with someone else because they could do this and this.” You're like, “I can do that,” but they were obviously better.
Sometimes you may have a very similar product to your competitor, but because of the way your sales team interacts, they become the competitive differentiator.
This emotional engagement and competitive differentiation are the leading indicators. I want to be super clear on this. Salespeople with a purpose bigger than money outsell salespeople focused on targets. Companies with a purpose bigger than money outperform the S&P by over 350%. This isn't some touchy-feely when you have the chance on a good day when you've had a good year. This is the very essence of creating a top-tier organization or if you're an individual contributor, top-tier performance for yourself and let all those other people wonder, “Is that person always number one?
Salespeople with a purpose outsell salespeople focused on targets.
I was always the top performer. I know it was because I valued the relationships first because I knew that my competitor wasn't necessarily the competing product, but it's the relationship the competitor has with the ideal client. If I could own the relationship, I would get all their projects, I would have snowball sales, I could easily ask for favors and referrals. What's tricky about that is the relationship to leadership is hard to quantify. I appreciate how you have boiled this down to your expertise and put it in a way that can be digestible at any level.
I want to say something about the relationship. I was coaching a senior executive and he's trying to build relationships. He said, “I've got these tickets to the Washington Capitals. I could ask people, but I'm not excited about it.” I said, “There's a reason you're not excited,” because even that is transactional and they will read right through you. I want to be super clear on this. This seller trying to be your buddy or your pal. No, customers can read intent. We have two groups of people who are better at reading intent than any other group of people ever.
1) We have more customers who are women. Women can read intent generally speaking. Why is this? Millions of years of having to protect ourselves, let’s us read intent. The reason we're alive is because our ancestors are good at it. That's one. The other thing we have is we have a younger group of buyers. This younger group of buyers came of age on the internet when everything was coming at them. They have a great BS meter. I grew up with like one guy on the news and I was like, “I guess that's true. He is on the news.” Younger people grew up with lots of information and they knew it wasn't all true. I have a client that summed it up well. She is the head of HR for a global bank. She has tons of people calling her trying to sell software and recruiting.
When we went in COVID when everything went virtual, she said, “What was annoying in person is intolerable on Zoom.” I was like, “Yes.” In-person, if I'm self-focused, we're going to have a cup of coffee, shake hands, sit down and do all those things that put little niceties around it. When we are emailing a prospect in your world or we are having that first conversation, all that nicety social stuff has been stripped away and you are reading my intent. If you are sending your salespeople out the door with, “Close it,” that is going to translate to your customers and it's not going to work anymore. If they do close it, it will come down to price and you will rebid that business every year.
You don't own anything. You can find a way to connect with intent and add value, that's going to be what shines through.
Back to your point about we all have this thing, “People do business with people they like. Be likable. Be trustworthy.” All that's true but that's the outcome. The reason people called you was you always had their back. They read your intent and they went, “You know,” and people are going to go past the least resistance. They're probably not thinking this in their head, but their little subconscious is going, “She's out for us. She cares about us. She always has our back. We could bid this thing and get a bunch of people.” That's going to take a bunch of my time.
You have the knowledge. It's like, “When you are on your other project, this is the roadblock we run into. Let's avoid it over here.”
You can do all of that on Zoom. You don't have to take him to lunch, be their buddy or take them to a Washington Capitals game. What we ended up coming up with was he's going to write a short white paper about his highest aspirations for his clients. I was like, “That's going to do you a ton more good,” because then you're putting your intent out there.
To your point of how is the customer going to be different after this interaction with me, it gives you that clarity too because I think sometimes, myself included, as I'm building my business, you miss those opportunities to narrow down and focus, “How is this person going to be different after working with me?” If you can keep asking yourself that's going to help finesse and massage that messaging and get it clear.
If you're a sales manager and you ask your seller, “How will they be different?” “Their accounting system will be faster.” Go further and say, “What will that affect?” It's going to be awkward and we're not looking for a perfect answer. As the sales manager, when you're asking the question and you see the wheels spinning, that's your magic moment. The right answer isn't your magic coaching moment. There's a brain science around this. If you've ever watched a toddler trying to do a puzzle and those puzzles have one piece that fits in and you watch them. When you are watching them struggle, they are developing a new neural pathway and they are learning. All those synapses are connecting. When it's easy, it's a habit.
When you ask your seller, “How will the customer be different?” They say, “Their accounting systems will be passed. They'll have more insight into their data.” What will that do for them? They'll make better decisions. What kinds of decisions? Who will be affected by that? Get them to do what we call the ripple effect. Because what happens is in our value prop, we often won't take credit for the things that we indirectly affect. I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt, our ripple effect is higher employee engagement, higher margin deals and increased market share. I can't 100% take credit for that. If I were to say our value prop to say, “I absolutely can do this.” If you have a competitor that invents something better than you, I can help you with employee engagement, but if you all of a sudden decide to cut their salaries or do some crap policy.
What happens is we're all like that, that we say, “I can't guarantee that.” If you can get clear on the ripple effect, they have better insight into their data, they make better decisions. Better in what way? They avoid mistakes. What kinds of mistakes? They can save costly ventures down the wrong path like choosing the wrong product or going after the wrong customer base. A lot of times you'll get people to push back and they'll go, “I can't guarantee that.” You don't have to guarantee it. Your insight into how you can affect it becomes the basis for your sales calls and then customers connecting the dots.
It gives an emotional end game. It's almost like going into the sales call with the intention. If the intention is this ripple effect benefit, then you're coming from a place of sincerity when you approach the meeting.
You can say something like, “Typically when people use our programs they get better insights into their data and it helps them make better decisions. Tell me a little bit about the decisions that you make that draw from data.” I'm in their world but in my lane that I can affect.
They share their reasoning and then it's almost like you're using their own business model to drive how you run.
There are some real distinctions here. The seller drives the interaction but is based on the customer's situation and objectives. That's an important nuance. You are proactive but you're not proactive in a push model. You are proactive setting the stage, “Typically we help people with differentiation.” “Tell me a little bit about how you are differentiating yourself.” “I don't know what the answers to that are going to be. I have 90% confidence that we can help you.” It's only 90%. You might say, “We sell the most vanilla thing on the planet and people buy everything on the web.” I say, “I think you need a good marketing consultant. Here you go.”
One of the things we observed in those top-performing sellers is there was a secret skill that they had and it was the ability to sit with uncertainty. That 90% confidence, I can help most people. I don't know exactly what it's going to look like for you and I'm not going to push something on you if you're in that 10%. That ability to sit with uncertainty, because we've all seen the sales rep where we say, “Ask more questions,” and the client says, “We might have a need with this a sales trip goes,” “I got it,” then pitch mode.
The ability to go, “Tell me a little more about.” What happens is you only gain that ability if you have a sight line to impact and have the true purpose, which is to improve the customer's life. If that's your end game, it gives you the ability to sit with uncertainty. If your end game is always the close, you are going to ride these waves of emotional highs and lows.
It's going to be harder for you to recover when you lost one. When you win one, you're not going to know why. If your end game is, “I am here to make a difference,” when you lose one you go, “Maybe it wasn't right for me or maybe I didn't dig deep in it.” You have a different response to loss some research outta Michigan State from Dr. Valerie Good who I must mention indicates that sellers who have this sense of higher purpose have more tenacity and more resilience because they're playing for bigger stakes. They're playing for impact.
Even the idea of sitting with the unknown or uncertainty, I think that is like a true test of confidence. If you're confident in that, that shines through too you're showing to your client that you're a trusted, established growth partner to them because you're confident enough to not know everything. That's what people want to work with.
It's hard if you're thinking, “It’s easy for her to say. She's sitting there and got a good business.” I will tell you, if you read the book, many years ago I was broke. I'd always had a successful career, but during the recession, we lost a family business that was in the construction industry and we went bankrupt. I know very well that needing the money and having to sit here calmly. That is very hard. What I came to realize was I don't have to be calm all the time. I only have to be calm in front of the customer.
That’s a separate conversation. One of the things that helped me is I had a lot of training. That was where I was starting to write this book. I thought, “You got to model this. You got to model it from a place of being down here to see if it works.” I remember before sales calls, there's a thing in the book, The Ten-Second Game Changer[1] . You take a breath and say, “I have a plan and I'm open. I'm here to figure out if I can make a difference to these people.” You only have to get yourself in that space for the duration of that sales call. You could have this microdose of confidence.
I do a power pose before all the big calls.
That calm, “I have a plan and I'm open.” That's what makes for a great sales call, not, “Willy-nilly, whatever they want,” but, “I've got some ideas. I've done my homework. I think I can help them, but this is going to be about them.” I used to tell myself, “I think, I'm pretty sure or there's a good likelihood that I can help them.” That gets me out of me and how much I might want to close this and to them. Over time, you build that muscle and you close more business and you know that it works. When you are behind on your number, your boss is in your ear, in my case you have college tuition doing 30 days, it's hard. What I remember thinking is all this freneticness, I need to put that into activity, not into the interactions or they'll read it.
I liked your comment about the leading indicators versus the results. I had a boss who would always say, “Keep doing the right thing and the results will follow.” I echo the feelings of sitting with uncertainty sometimes where's like if you keep leads and showing up authentic with a place of purpose that's going to shine through.
It has never been truer than at this moment because two things happened during Covid. Having been through the recession in a big, bad, ugly way, I knew that when we have these big events, people change. Two things happen during the recession, sellers start asking themselves, “Why am I here? Am I a cog in your money machine? Does what we do even make a difference? There's no coffee bar, sales meeting, swag or getting together with my buddies. There's me, in my Zoom at my kitchen table with my laptop.”
Sellers start asking, “Does our work matter?” The second thing was customers started asking, “Are you here to help me or are you here to sell me?” COVID may be over, but those two questions remain at the forefront of the seller's relationship with the employer and the customer's relationship with the seller. The companies that master those and answer, “You are more than a cove money machine. Our work matters.” The sellers who answer that with a customer, “I am here to help you. I am here to make a difference.” We are already seeing those are the companies that are winning.
Leading with Noble Purpose: How to Create a Tribe of True Believers
I feel it. We see it. I think that everyone who's listening echoes that. I think a great starting point will be Lisa's books. Before we wrap up, I have like a story I want to share with you, but is there anything else you want to leave the audience with? That's my first question.
Yes. Go to our website. We have got some good HBR articles that we've done. One was How To Scale Your Sales Team Quickly. That was a great article I thought. Another was How to Be A Purpose-Driven Leader Without Burning Out.
Lisa's on LinkedIn.
Follow me on LinkedIn. I took a break from doing LinkedIn Lives. I'm starting to do them again for fifteen minutes.
We have great authors on too. You always learn something. What I love about Lisa is you're very contemporary. You keep up with what's happening in sales right now versus just tried and true. You're very a contemporary thought leader. I appreciate that about you.
That was a nice way of saying you're old yet you still know what's going on. I'm not telling you sales stories from 1991.
It's fresh and current. It's going to help for selling on LinkedIn, virtual landscapes and multi-generations. You're very contemporary and current.
The core principles are product and market-agnostic.
That's the thing. I want to share a quick story about how I met Lisa because as I was prepping for our interview, I was searching my Google Drive and I found a list of dream guests that I wanted to have on the show. You were my number one dream guest. One of the things that I want to leave this group with is a prospecting, business development sales mindset, those are the things we talk about. Sometimes you have to put yourself in the position to get the meeting. I was introduced to Lisa. We had a quick meet and greet. I knew you lived in Georgia because I followed your LinkedIn lives.
I was going, “I had to be in Miami. I had a free place to stay in Atlanta. I bring people I wanted to meet in Atlanta.” You were 1 of my 3. I've got a rental car. I stayed in this person's house in their spare bedroom and I emailed like, “I'm going to be in town.” You said, “I live quite a way out of the city.” I was like, “I live in LA, it doesn't matter.” It was one of those things where it was funny because I knew that you would understand where I was coming from and trying to get a meeting with you. I knew that the pleasantly persistent was going to be accepted. Sometimes you need to get to Atlanta, rent a car, pack your book, your purse, show up and take Lisa to breakfast so she can sign your book and be on show.
You were pleasantly and politely persistent. I love it and I could see your intent. I had been out of town. I remember I was like, “I can tell she wants to meet. She is very earnest about this.” I'm like, “This is you twenty years ago, go meet with her and do this.” It was a great meeting.
I had the best time. I think that is what this is all about. I want to thank you much from the bottom of my heart for being on the show. Lisa is a keynote speaker and a corporate trainer. She is the real deal. I am grateful for you taking the time to talk to us.
Thanks. I do want to take a minute to talk about your business. It all starts with the prospecting. If you are not prospecting with this sense of purpose, you are not going to get the meetings. If you do, they're going to be very transactional. I love that you have zeroed in on the things that people do badly. That is like the linchpin thing. I love your business.
Thank you. We call it Prospecting On Purpose because we want to go in with intention and a plan of what the outcome like, “I'm going to Atlanta for these three people. I'm getting the car and going to make it happen.” I want you to be more accountable to do it. You never know where life's going to take you. Now I know I feel like I can call you Lisa if I'm stuck and say, “I'm stuck.” I think you would take my call. That wasn't the intention of having you on the show. I want to spread this message because it's something that resonates deeply with me. Thank you so much.
