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76: 3 ways to use ancient philosophy to run your sales team more effectively · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: People have been studying other people and life for literally millennia.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's gone on for centuries and centuries and thousands and thousands of years.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, despite all the changes, all the things that we've adapted to in this world, most of the fundamentals about how people should work with people and how people deal with life are kind of the same.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: And we can find the secrets about how to get back to these basics when we think about the ancient philosophers.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Find out what this means for sales leaders in this episode.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to episode 76 of the Bite Side Sales Podcast.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Recording this on Tuesday, April 28th, 2020, in Colorado.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: And we are in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Here where I am in Colorado, it's we're under a stay-at-home order, like many of us are.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: So we're doing our best to do that.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: The odd trip here and there to the grocery store is what we're doing, but we're relying, frankly, on all the gig economy services to keep us going.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And we couldn't be more thankful for all those people who are doing the Instacart deliveries and all these things, DoorDashes to keep the population fed and allow us to have groceries at home.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: And also, this is a great time.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't done it yet on the podcast, but we owe, I owe my family, we all owe thanks to all the emergency workers that are working, the doctors, people in the ER, everyone in the hospital who's going about their jobs to respond as they've been trained, as they want to do, in this uh incredibly tough, interesting, taxing environment, right?
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's for all of us to get through.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know when you're gonna be listening to this, but hopefully, if in the future we can you'll be looking back saying that the things have cleared up and we're all back to normal or some sort of normal and things are moving ahead.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Right now it feels like we're almost ready to come out of lockdown, but you know, you can kind of wonder if we're there and if we are there.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Is it too early?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, lots of unknowns right now, which creates for an interesting dynamic.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: So on to business at hand.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: So ancient philosophers and sales leadership.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, leading people, working with people, dealing with life, nothing new, right, in the last 10, 20 years.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: We're all human beings.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe our motivations have changed a little bit over the years, over the centuries, right?
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: As the human race has evolved and as we've grown.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: But some of the absolute fundamentals are pretty much the same.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's interesting as you look back on some of the ancient philosophers and ancient philosophies that have been around for so long, some of the insights that we can gain to recognize that things haven't changed that much.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: There's some things that we can learn.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I think in the last few years, there definitely has been this move to look back at the way things have been for so long.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Stoicism is something that's been popularized in the last few years, and there's definitely something there to learn from.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: So in this episode, we're gonna look at three ancient philosophies and see what it can, how we can use some of their fundamentals to help us be better sales leaders.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: So the first one is Hinduism.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: We know it today as a religion.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: It goes back years and millennia and longer, and in many ways it's got a lot of philosophy about it, as many religions do.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that Hinduism has at its core is the idea is you can't have one thing without the other.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: You can't have good without evil, you can't have light without dark, and that's just the way of the world and how things work.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: So when I think about what that might mean for sales, I think about you can't have great sales reps without having the odd bad sales rep, right?
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: But perhaps the more useful way to think about it is when we're working with ourselves, but maybe our team as well, and they're going through some sort of slump or they're going through a bad patch, we can help them by saying by rationalizing things by saying, look, we can't all be just charging ahead, you know, growing like this all the time, bottom left to top right, however this video goes, and it's just not this perfect straight line, and everything's all hunky dory, right?
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: The fact is, day to day, week to week, month to month, quarter to quarter, year to year, there's gonna be great periods, and even for the most successful and highest performing sales reps, there's gonna be dips in there.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: There's gonna be days and weeks where you kind of wonder if it's worth doing sometimes.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: I know I've been there in my career where, you know, both as a leader and also as a rep, you kind of sit there staring at the wall, wondering, what the heck, you know, there's gotta be an easier way to make money than this sometimes.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: But then you get through it and you realize, look, I do actually know what I'm doing, I can get through this, and you come out the other side quite successfully.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: But when you've got a team member, one of your sellers who is struggling, you just imagine they are sitting there staring at the wall, wondering, how do I get out of this?
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: And they're in that mode of feeling the world's against them, they feel like the company's not doing enough, that they might be playing the blame game a little bit.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's a tough space to be in.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe one way to work with them is to help them realize that there's gonna be ups and there's gonna be downs.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: And there's gonna be good days, there's gonna be bad days.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: There's gonna be highly successful deals that close quickly and for large amounts, and there's gonna be those that you work on for a long period of time that never close, and you feel like you wasted so many weeks and months on them.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the way it is, right?
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: And if you can coach them on the idea that they need to keep moving forward, because if they're in that dark spot, they will get to that light spot, be back on that track to greatness and achieving great things.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Philosophy number two is Zen, a phrase, a word that's thrown around quite a lot for many different reasons, sometimes in jest, sometimes seriously.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: But one of the things that uh the fundamentals about Zen philosophy is that we all have what we need within us to be successful, right?
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's this idea that we don't need a whole bunch of things to be added to our lives and what we do in order to be successful.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: So and it's actually a great fundamental when you're thinking about coaching and coaching people, is if you start with a philosophy that this person has within them everything they need to be successful, we just need to help them get it out of them and get them to use it.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the answers, when you truly coach someone and they're asking you for the answers, most of the answers, if you just challenge them a little bit and push back with a good coaching questions, they'll find they know things already.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: They just need to rely and be confident in themselves that they can do it.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one of the things, the aspects of of this is that even if you physically don't have something right now, you have the resourcefulness to go get it.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: If I was listening to what I'm saying right now, I might push back and say, Well, look, if this person hasn't been trained, if this person hasn't been trained to drive a car, let's say, it's not like they're just gonna magically get behind the wheel and suddenly they'll just figure out in the first 20 yards, right?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: It might end up being a disaster.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: But what they do have within them is the resourcefulness to figure out what it is that they should be doing.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: So they have the resourcefulness in that example to go get lessons, to watch the videos, to figure out how to how they should drive safely before jumping in the car and charging down the freeway.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: So if your rep is in a situation where they're kind of searching for how to be successful, looking for answers on deals, they've got things stalled, they're looking for maybe you know, the shiny uh object about how to correct the prospecting that is causing them so much pain.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: What you should be able to do is really challenge them, have that coaching conversation and say, you know, if you could dig within you, where what do you think these answers might be?
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Based on what you know right now, what would you do tomorrow if you had to, you know, take a different attack on this deal or or this prospecting or this person?
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: And if you can challenge them as a coach with these questions, you'll find that they can draw within themselves a lot of the answers that you would have maybe just given them, but they won't be quite so bought into because they weren't pushed to really think about things themselves.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea that all your team has it within them to be successful, and your job is just to draw it out of them, is gonna help you be successful, and just as importantly, it's gonna help them be more successful going down the road.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: Stoicism is philosophy number three we're gonna talk about on this episode.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: And this is being popularized by many people in the last few years, including including Tim Ferris.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one of the ideas behind Stoicism is that you only work on and focus on what's within your direct control.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's lots of things you could be thinking about, there's lots of things you could be trying to plan, there's lots of things that might be coming at you.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: But it's important to retain focus on only the things within your control.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when you're thinking about leading a team, you know, it's very easy.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Think about your reps working on big deals, they're gonna be worried about lots of things.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: They're gonna be naturally trying to think five different ways till Sunday about how all how all these this deal is gonna go down.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: But it's important that while they think about that, that they really get sharp and focus on what they are actually gonna do next that's within their control.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: They may say, I want to go get this person on board, right?
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: They can't actually directly control that.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: What they can control is their own behavior to go meet with that person, talk to them about a certain subject, and then if it's planned properly and they're in control, then it's likely they're gonna get the result.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: But it's this idea that I'm sure you've all seen it, right?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: When someone's sitting there at the start of the year for, for example, and they're staring at a big quota and a low pipeline, and they're worried about their chances of being successful, and they're scared about whether they're gonna make money and are they gonna get fired, who knows what's going through their mind, right?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Our job is to draw them back into the here and now and draw them into things they can control.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I I love the idea of very simple KPIs or assessments around this.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: So someone might say that you know the thing they can control is them picking up the phone and making calls, or the thing they can they control is is reaching out by email to the CIO or CEO, right?
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's what to get them focused on because that's what's gonna get them driving down the right road for results.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: So in stoicism, the idea that there's focus just on what's in your control, and then think about the single best next step to take to move down that path.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: And suddenly, if someone has that thought process, sure they might have thought a bit about the future and the planning and you know, all the things that they should be thinking about, but their focus is on what they can control right now.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: So knowing these principles is gonna help you as you work with your team, it's gonna help them get through tough times and good times and be successful.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: But to borrow one of the principles from Stoicism, in terms of your action from this, pick just one of those to start working on.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Don't try and do all three with every single team member.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Think about how I could take one of these principles tomorrow or today and work with one team member to start them down this road because maybe this is going to help them be successful.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: Don't get lost in all the big plans you have to uh implement these things across the team and change your whole philosophy.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: Don't do that.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Think about one thing to do with one person in the next day to start going down this path.