Episode 129: Go For No with Richard Fenton Andrea Waltz

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Welcome to another episode of the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. My name is Bradley Hammond, your host. On today's episode, we have Richard Fenton and Andrea Waltz. They are the founders of Courage Crafters, Inc. and the authors of the bestselling book Go for No. They speak internationally, teach business, sales, and entrepreneurial audiences how to overcome their fear of rejection and achieve extraordinary sales results by hearing no more often. Go for No was first introduced to me, the book, uh, gosh, several years ago, and I put it on the bookshelf, not read it, and then picked it back up. I think you're going to get a tremendous amount out of this episode with them. I just really enjoyed this conversation. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Richard and Andrea.

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Andrea and Richard, welcome to the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

Yeah, thank you, Bradley.

Yep, great to be here.

Excited to have you. So we always start with background and origin story. And so for those of you that are not familiar with you and familiar with your book Go for No, just kind of take us back, bring us to present day, is kind of how you guys both got started and, um, and what led to the, uh, to the writing of the book.

So Richard and I met when we were still in the corporate world. We were both working for LensCrafters. Richard was one of our best trainers in the, in the company. And I was running one of their highest volume store locations. And he would come in and visit my store and impart his training wisdom. And I was always trying to catch him on things. I would, I would come up with scenarios, difficult sales scenarios, try to, try to trap him because he always seemed to have all these perfect answers. But we realized early on that we had the same sales philosophies, customer service philosophies, management ideas. And we just got along so well that one day he said, you know, we should write a book together. And then eventually he convinced me that we should leave our jobs altogether and go out and train and speak about this topic that he called Go for No. Go for No was an entirely new philosophy and strategy to me. Which I will let him explain. But that, yeah, that's what we did. And I was just naive enough to go along with it and say, yeah, sure, why not? Let's leave our jobs and start our own business. Why not?

Amazing.

Is that me now? Yeah, the, the strategy Go for No came about as an event that happened to me in my sales career. I was working for a men's clothing store. And my sales were so bad, I was pretty sure they were going to fire me. And one day, the district manager, a man by the name of Harold, came into the store. And I thought, man, if I could just impress this guy this one time, you know, maybe they'd give me some more time to improve my sales. And sure enough, this gentleman comes in, I take care of him. About 15 minutes later, I've got an $1,100 sale, which for the time period— we're going back almost 40 years now— was a good sale. And I walked him out of the store, came back in, and they waited for Harold, the district manager, to congratulate me. And he didn't say anything. And after a couple minutes, finally he threw me a bone. He said, "Hey, that was a nice sale, kid." And I said, "Yeah, man. Did you see that $1,100? He bought a suit and sport coats and shirts and ties." And I started running through the whole list of everything the guy had said yes to. And Harold said, whoa, whoa, stop. He said, I already know what he said yes to. It's right there on the sales ticket. He said, I'm just going to ask you right now, out of curiosity, what did he say no to? And I have to tell you, Bradley, the question hit me like a punch because it was the first time I realized that nos even mattered. I had no no consciousness, consciousness, if you will. And I said, He didn't say no to anything. And then Harold asked the other really great question. He said, well, then how did you know he was done? And I have to tell you, in that period, the way I knew a customer was done is when they stopped saying yes. You know, they hit my mental spending limit. If they hit my mental spending limit, and I was a young guy, I'd never spent more than $1,000 on clothing in my life. When you got to $1,000, you were done. I mean, I would just wrap up the sale and send you on your way. And Harold was kind enough to say, you know, I watched you sell and you're not half bad, but your fear of the word no is going to kill you. And then he said, I think though, if you could just get over that, if you could get over this one hurdle in your life, he said, I think you're going to become one of the great ones. And I went home that night and I thought about everything he said. And I decided that I was going to make a conscious effort to intentionally increase my failure rate, to intentionally increase the number of times I got customers to say no to me on the sales floor. And I went in the next day with that attitude. And all I can say is it worked. The man, the man was right. Increasing the number of times I heard the word no dramatically increased the number of times I heard the word yes. And, and my sales career and then my training career was off and running. So that's how we based our business.

That's unbelievable. What a great story. What an impact that he has had on you. And then now the trickle-down effect— it's almost like the butterfly effect— that him pouring into you there in that sale, and he could have patted you on the back and told you how great you were and all those things, great sale, you're doing all those things. But yet, because he poured into developing you and helping you to get better, think about all the, the sales leaders and business owners and their teams that you've impacted, and then all of those clients just from that one thing. I think that's pretty remarkable if you really think of— stop and think about it. So for those of you that are not familiar with the book, why don't you walk us through— Andrew, Richard, either one— walk us through the general philosophy. So everybody, we got the premise of it, but what are some of the most important principles— I should say, so now that we've got the philosophy, what are some of the important principles of, of, uh, how do we go about intentionally increasing our failure rate and not having a fear of no?

So I love that you use the word principles because the book really is made up of a collection of timeless principles, and it doesn't matter the business or industry. I think it applies to everyone. I will say, if you haven't read it, the book is a fable. It's about a guy who goes to bed one night. He's an average salesman, nothing, nothing special. He's not horrible, but he's not spectacular. He goes to bed one night and he wakes up in a house this spectacular house, and he discovers after walking through this house and doing a little investigating that it belongs to a wildly successful future version of himself, a version of himself 10— he has somehow magically, supernaturally transferred 10 years into the future, and there's this super successful version of himself. And so in the book, he really spends the time actually getting to talk to this other version of himself, and they're trying together, trying to figure out What was the moment where kind of their paths diverged and how did this successful version become so successful? And as we find out, the secret really is the story that Richard just shared. It's go for no, you know, it's being able and willing and wanting to hear no more often. So the foundation of the book, probably the most important principle is something that Richard also just alluded to. And that is that you have to be willing to fail. You have to be willing to hear no more often. That is the, the foundation of it. And in the book we talk about 2 models for failure and success. The first model is the one that we have all been taught. It's the one that society teaches and trains us and really pours into us constantly. And we feel, I think, as a society, we're almost stuck into this model, and that is where we're in the middle. Failures on one side. Success is on the other. You can think of it as yes and no as well. No is on one side, yes is on the other. And we've been taught to do everything within our power to move toward success and away from failure, avoid failure. Don't fail. That's embarrassing. You, you wouldn't, what would people think? Right. And really there's a new model that we should all be operating with. And that is a model where we're actually on one side, failure, rejection, hearing the word no is in the middle. And the success we're seeking, the yeses, everything that we're going after in life is on the other side of this. So it's not where failure and success are choices, where they're opposites. They're actually instead opposite sides of the same coin. You cannot have one without the other. If you want more success in your life, if you want more yeses in your business, you have got to be willing to hear no more often. And if you can embrace that, that is the foundation, then it really I think opens you up. It keeps you open-minded to all of the other, um, principles and strategies that we lay out in the book. But that's the central one. That's the most important. And it is the most important because it's the one that people have to fight against the most because of how we've all been taught and trained.

You know, do you think, Richard, that just in general— so this outside of sales, do you feel like that people by nature, some people are just more resilient and willing to be able to hear no? Or do you feel like that it's the environment, you know, the, from their parents, the experiences in their early positions, jobs, the mentors that they had? I mean, do you feel like that some people, there's like, it just, it really rolls off their back, it doesn't affect them at all. And then other people It's challenging, right? The fear of no, the fear of rejection for a salesperson, and I'll come back around to that question a little bit. But do you feel like that's innate for some people?

It's a great question, and I've thought about it a lot. And I don't have a degree in psychology or sociology or parenting or any of those things. But I've had enough experience in my own life, and have done enough reading to come to the conclusion that we're only born with a couple things that come standard on the model, if you were, you know, like we're a car, you know, we come standard with the, with the desire for love, and the fear of loud noises. You know, somebody yells, doesn't matter if it's a baby, the baby's going to cry. We need food. So we know how to cry for it and ask for that. But everything else that we develop over time in terms of— we'll call it resilience, as you labeled it— is learned, in my opinion, in my opinion. And it's not learned per se out of books, or from teachers in school, although it could be. It's learned by the way we're— by the way we're nurtured. You know, I'm not a— I'm not a naturist. I'm a nurturist. And I do believe that parents from the earliest times begin to teach their kids how to behave and how to respond and what to laugh at and what to cry over and what things are scary and what things aren't. I remember one day I was in a parking lot. This is an odd story, but I think it makes the point. I was in a parking lot. And this kid came running down, down between the cars, and he tripped and he fell, fell right on his knees and his hands. And it's like, bang, right? And he looked up at me, and I went, boom! And I smiled. And he went, hehehe, and he giggled. And then his mother ran around the corner of behind the cars.

And she went, oh no, oh no, honey.

And he turned and looked at her and went, ooh, ah, ah, ah, and he started screaming. And I thought, you see, this is the environment in which he is raised. He has been trained that he can get attention, or that when you fall, you're supposed to, you're supposed to cry and scream. And I think that had that mother raised him in a different way, him falling there would have been, would have been a source of great laughter. But instead, it was a source of great trauma. So you transfer that idea, and you think of it in terms of failure and rejection. You know, what happens when the kid comes home from school and gets a, gets a C- on the test, right? Or, or when the, the kid draws a, uh, takes a crayon and draws a picture on the wall and goes, Mommy, Daddy, look at the picture I drew. Well, I have to tell you, a kid draws a picture on a wall and the parents yell and scream and hit this kid, he's not drawing anymore. He's been trained that drawing and being artistic relates to pain. That's what that turns into. On the other hand, if they just, you know, smiled and looked at each other like, "Okay, we're gonna have to clean this off later," and then they gushed over him, they just said, "Oh my God, you're the greatest artist to ever live," that kid would probably, you know, be drawing every day for the rest of his life. And so bringing it back to this idea of failure and rejection, I think early on we are given guidance by the people around us to either think that failure is a good thing and it's something to be applauded and rewarded and recognized, or we're taught that it's something bad and it's something to be avoided and that we should, quote, reject rejection, right? Because there's something wrong with it. And industries are like that too. Last thing I'll say here, industries are like that too. There are certain industries, and sadly the sales industry is one of the ones where people are constantly told that trying to get a sale and having it not work out, very rarely are they rewarded for that and said, great job, you got a no. Congratulations. Let's see if you can get some more nos from them, bigger nos tomorrow. That is very, very rare. And yet in certain industries like Silicon Valley, Failure is a rite of passage. There are companies where if you haven't started a company and you haven't failed and gone bankrupt already, you can't even get a job there. Because they're wondering, what is it about you that you're unwilling to try and fail? So industries, parents, schools, you know, all over the place, people are either taught that failure and rejection has a positive side to it, or they're taught to avoid it. So I'm going, I'm going with nurture over nature.

I love it. You know, there was a, there was a podcast on Built to Sell Radio, and it was about a year ago. And they interviewed this guy who was a founder of a consulting company. And when I say consulting, I mean, they did— I think they were doing $30-40 million a year in revenue. So they were a boutique consulting company, but more in a McKinsey You know, and their culture was one that was very fast-paced. They, they worked their tails off. They played hard, they worked hard. A lot of people were not cut out for it. It was a small company. They ended up selling this consulting company for something like $150 million. I mean, it was just an unbelievable exit. The reason I'm telling you that story is every week whenever the guy was given his, um, you know, like, what led to your success and tell us about this culture. He said every Friday we would, um, we'd all go out for drinks, you know, and, um, we would give $1,000, $1,000 away to the person who had the biggest screw-up. Insert a different word in there. Had the biggest screw-up of the week. And he said we would have some big ones, but they actually rewarded the screw-up. And he said that led to our culture of we were so aggressive and so willing to take chances that it's what led us to be able to get to the point that we did. And that's, you know, and I thought that's what I was thinking about whenever you were saying that, that they created that culture to say it doesn't matter if you screw up because we're going to— we're just going to go for it anyway. And so much that they were willing to give $1,000. Now these people were making really good money. These consultants were making, you know, $1 million a year or so, something like that. But I think it's illustrative to your point, Andrea.

Yeah, I was just going to say, well, on the flip side of this, this is not any anti anything my wonderful partner over here just shared. However, also in addition to the nurture side of it, We are biologically wired to not want to be rejected. Uh, it is, it is completely hardwired into our DNA. Uh, it's a survival mechanism. It's very important that you not get thrown out of the tribe and left to hunt and gather on your own. That would be a very bad thing. But of course, here in the 21st century, we don't need to operate that anymore, but our brains are really stuck. You know, they're, they're going back hundreds and thousands of years. And so we have to combat that. And so when you add in the fact that you are wired and you have to fight against that wiring, and then you add in that, that nurturing, if you have somebody who sees failure and rejection as part of the process is something that you move through, as opposed to you see examples of people in your life where you don't want to get rejected, you don't want to fail because it's, it's shameful or embarrassing, then those will imprint upon you. You add that to the built-in DNA of rejection and then you have your outcome. I will tell you this, Bradley, too. We'll speak to a group of 1,000 people. There's always one person, though, who comes up who says, "I have zero fear of rejection. I'm so glad you guys are here for everybody else. I don't have a problem. I can hear no all day. It's water off a duck's back. It's no problem," and it's interesting, because there is always one, and then for the rest of us, Richard and myself included, because we always say we could never written, go for no, if we were fearless, if we didn't have this as an issue. We have to fight against all of those things.

You know what? It would be funny. I bet that person who says that is pretty— would be, would be pretty— it wouldn't be uncommon for them to be very athletic and active in sports. And I guarantee you that if those people lined up and we were going to play a basketball game, and there was 10 people and you purposely chose that person last, you can bet that they would have a chip on their shoulder about that, that they, that they had just been rejected in that way. Right. So I think that even those people, they may in a sales environment have been able to kind of cultivate this mindset, but in another aspect of their life, that would, that would be offensive to them that they were not chosen first. I don't know. What do you think?

Do you agree with that, Andrea?

Yeah, well, absolutely. And And sports is a perfect analogy for this because it dovetails right— sales and sports, I think, are so similar in mindset and in behavior. And so absolutely, I think you'd see that.

So I'm going to ask this next question. I think this is really critical. This is maybe one of the— I guess would be the cornerstone question I wanted to ask you is we have a lot of business owners and sales leaders that listen to the podcast. And so when they're bringing on someone, uh, to be in a sales role, whether that person's been in sales or not— but let's just take the fact that, you know, they're not in sales, but they, they feel like that they have the requisite, you know, traits and disposition for it, you know. And, and I wish I could recall the podcast that we just recently did where this came up, where, you know, just early on, a new salesperson, once they've gotten past the the training, they just get beat up and they cannot handle— they're not prepared to handle the rejection. And so we could do all the logical, hey, look, you got a 25% closing ratio, that's industry standard, that's our office standard, that's not a big deal, you know. Um, what's, what's another one? I've used this one before. If you bat.300 in the, in major leagues, you know, you're going to the Hall of Fame. And so that means you're going to fail 70% of the time. And everybody's like, logically gets it, except until the person says no, no, no, and it just wears on them for a period of time. So my question is this, with all of that context, is what are the things that we can begin to do, um, as a sales leader to our sales teams, and especially our current sales teams, but even people that we bring on, is kind of where I was thinking about, to prepare them for what is going to be the naturally— and as you said, like, they're going to have to go through the rejection in the, in the, in the nose. To get to the success that they want? Richard?

Yeah, it's an interesting question, and I do think this, um, this comes back to this question of, um, resilience to a degree. Uh, you know, we have a— we have an intellectual side to our brain, and I forget if it's the right side or the left side or the back or the front, and I don't really care. Um, and we, we have this emotional side to our brain And when we would do, you know, we do our workshops, we found there were very distinctly two groups of people. We would do the entire workshop and there would be a group of people who would say, oh my God, I get it. You know, it's a numbers game. If I increase the number of times I hear no, I'll get more yeses. I can do this. And then they go out and they do it. And then you have the second group of people who would say, oh, I get it. It's a numbers game. If I increase the nos, I increase the yeses. But I can't do it.

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And so you wonder, well, okay, so, so why is it that this one group of people who's hearing the exact same information as the other group of people. One group's able to go out and apply the concepts, and the second group isn't. And I'll tell you quite frankly, it's about an 80/20. And by that, I mean 20% of the people can go out and apply the concepts immediately. And the other 80% who hear it and intellectually get it, and yet they still stumble through it. And the primary thing, and there's certainly things that sales leaders do, um, or could do more correctly. Maybe they do wrong, um, but primarily it's the way we internalize what it means when we hear the word no. When we hear the word no, the question becomes, so what does that no mean to you? What does it mean to you when you hear the word no? Now, some people immediately— this first group who seem to be resilient hear the word no and immediately say like, hey, they're not rejecting me. This has nothing to do with anything I've done. They're rejecting the company, the product, the service, the size, the color, the price, the timing. They're rejecting some aspect of this thing. But whatever aspect it is that they're rejecting, it's not me. And therefore they don't take it personally. When you don't take something personally, it has a lot less influence over you. This other group of people have this tendency when someone says no to them, they immediately start saying things like, I did it wrong. I should have asked better questions. I probably showed them the wrong color or the wrong size. They start doing the I, I, I. It's all me. I screwed this up. In other words, the reason that this sale went south was because of them. And they don't think of it as being because of the customer. They always place the blame on themselves. And this idea that you place the blame on yourself, so you want to see how ridiculous this is. You think about two ice creams sitting side by side at Baskin-Robbins, 33 flavors. And you've got the jalapeño pecan is sitting next to the bubblegum. And the person comes in and says, I'll take the jalapeño pecan. And how was the bubblegum supposed to take that personally? Hmm. Has it crossed the bubblegum's mind that maybe the next customer in will pick them instead of the other? That it didn't have anything to do with the ice cream, it had everything to do with the preference of the customer and all of these other aspects. I'm not saying the salespeople don't influence sales. Of course they do. And they bring a lot of talent and skill and nuance to the party. And over time, they get better at the quality of the sale. But in the beginning, in order to even get to that level to where you can overcome these things and learn, you know, how to be excellent, you've got to start with the idea that they are not rejecting me. They are not rejecting me personally. And it's this taking of the— of no being a personal issue I think that becomes the, the biggest issue. Now, I'm not sure if that answered your question exactly, but that's where my train of thought went.

No, I think it's perfect. So with that, whenever I'm just thinking around my own experience, and I'm thinking honestly a little bit around salespeople, but even customer service people that you will train to kind of a send, right? Cross-sell current customers. And so their disposition is not nearly as well trained because they're not as accustomed to hearing no's. They're just— they just don't see it as much. And so it really kind of wears on them. And so the logical of, you know, ask this many people, that sort of thing. So if they—

if you—

if you see that they're internalizing it as like, ah, they said no to me again, Right? They didn't say no to the product. They said no to me again. How do you begin to help that person? Right? We're getting kind of deep in psychological here, but I mean, I think this is the thing. It's like, how do you help that person to work through it so that they do not internalize it that way to say, no, it's, it's not that? How do you help walk them through that?

Well, I think, um, Can I interrupt you for one second? Yeah.

This is just a nuance. I don't want to forget it. And I understand why you asked the question the way you did, but it's even in that wording for most people, it's like they said no to me. It's no, it's they said no about me. They said no about me. They are rejecting something about me. You know, you can say no to somebody and they're saying no to you, but that no is about the product and service. But people take it like you're saying it about me. Sure, a real deep, deep level thing. So you're gonna do no goals, is that where you're going? Or—

and I have to— I want to add in on that too, because I think that is such a good point, is that, um, I mean, I can do this at times without even realizing it. We become self-deprecating. I see, I knew they were going to say no to me. See, I knew I wasn't good enough. I knew I wasn't a good enough salesperson. I knew that I wasn't trained good enough. And then it begins down this thought. And so then the next time I get, I get motivated again. I get inspired again. Tony Robbins comes on. I see a Tony Robbins thing and I'm fired up. So I'm going like, you know what? I'm going to push through this. And then I ask, I go to the next person and then they say no. It's like, ah, see, see, I told you it doesn't matter. This Tony, this, this motivational stuff doesn't work because like I, they said no to me again. So yeah, I totally agree with that, Andrea.

Well, and I know why, I know why Richard just brought up no goals because that is a strategy. So I will speak to this. But I'm going to go back to— so one of the strategies that we teach people, and this is in the book as well, Bradley, and you were asking about the principles in the book. One of them is the way that we set goals. We teach people to set what we call no goals, which is a goal for the number of nos that they're going to hear. Instead of setting a goal for your typical yes goal, you might have a yes goal of getting 3 yeses for appointments this week or 3 deals that close, whatever. Instead, we teach people, set a goal for the number of nos you're going to hear. You might want to hear 25 nos to sitting down and, and, um, for an appointment, or 25 nos to looking at a policy or something like that. And when you do that, it very much focuses— it forces you to focus not so much on the results but on the behavior. And we want people to get behavioral focused and, and focus on the income-producing activities that they know lead to business, which is reaching out to people, asking good questions, asking if they'd like to sit down and have a meeting and learn more. You know, these are, these are the fundamental income-producing behaviors. And when we do those things, those things are what leads to the yeses. Those things are what leads to the nos. And we can kind of gamify it and start having fun with it and start counting the number of times that we get no, trying to hit this no goal, and when we hit the no goal, celebrating that. During this process, the yeses are coming. They're happening throughout the process of achieving your no goal. They're happening less— with less intention almost. They're happening more stress-free. They're happening as a byproduct of focusing on our behaviors and not looking at every interaction as to the value of me as person. I'm looking at every interaction. If I'm good, I'm looking at every interaction, especially when people are new. They look at every interaction as, um, as almost a scale of belief of whether I can continue to do this and be successful. And that's what a good sales leader has to do. We— a good sales leader has to get those, especially those early people, through that initial dip where they have the training, now it's going out and it's applying the things they've learned, but there's that dip of, and they're constantly testing their belief. Can I get this rejected? Can I have experienced this much rejected rejection and be successful? And the sales leader's gotta be there for them at every point saying, yes, you can. Just like if you were an actor and the actor goes out for audition after audition and experiences all this rejection, can you really be successful as an actor and keep getting turned down from roles? For roles, absolutely you can. So the sales manager's job really is to work on that belief. And one of the ways that they can do that is help their people set these no goals and have fun with it and see that the yeses are, are out there and they are behind the nos. And almost people's attitude when we do this shifts on the backend. So it's not so much almost about trying to change people's attitudes on the frontend, especially when the attitude is one of fear, because you could talk to somebody till you're blue in the face about how to deal with their fear. You've got to force them, just like with a kid in the swimming pool. You got to push them into the deep end, you got to force them to swim. You, you know, you have to almost push people out of their comfort zones, and their attitude will change on the back end.

I think that's so good. I love the fact that you distinguish between results-based to behavioral-based. I think it is, you know, uh, we were talking about such a parallel between sales and sports. This is one example where there is a little bit of a difference, where in sports, you know, we've got college football coming up this, this, uh, in a few weeks, and, you know, the winning team is going to celebrate, the fans are going to celebrate, the losing team is not going to celebrate. Um, and so that's not innate for us to be celebrating, you know, the fact that somebody went to— no, I don't know where I was going to put this in, so I got to put it in here. And I wish I could give credit to the person who told me and where they got it from. But they were telling the story about a, um, maybe it was a friend of mine that owns a Toyota dealership here locally in Huntsville, Zach. Um, maybe it was from him, I'm not sure. But he told the story of one of the top car salesmen, not at his place but just in general. And the guy would go out, meet with somebody who pulled in, and they— he would walk in and he would say, that's one. That's 2, that's 3. And he— and somebody said, what are you doing? He said, well, if I count my— how many people tell me no, I'll never get to 10. I never get to 10 before I make a sale, you know? And I thought, wow, what a— what a— what an interesting mindset there, Richard.

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Yeah, it reminds me of the W. Clements Stone philosophy. Um, you tell it.

Yeah, W. Clement Stone was the original publisher of Success Magazine and owned a company called the Combined Insurance, um, Company of America. I don't know that it still operates under that name.

Uh, Aon now.

Okay, I think. Yeah, and, uh, and, um, he knew that every time they hired a new salesperson, they were going to face an immense amount of rejection, especially in the beginning before they got good at what they did. And so he would give each new salesperson 20 beans, and I mean dry beans, and say, put these in your left pocket. Every time you make a call and somebody tells you no, take one bean out of your left pocket, move it over into the right pocket. He said, I promise you, you will make a sale before all 20 beans have moved from one pocket to the other. Now, to your point, statistically, they would close 1 in every 10 calls in that company. So by giving them 20 beans, I mean, let's face it, you could make 10 in a row and actually get 10 nos in a row, especially when you're new, especially when you don't know what you're doing. Um, but he knew that if he made 20 calls, they would make a sale, and that one sale would be enough of a positive to be able to keep that person going and staying with the company. Now, what's interesting about all that is though, that every time you move the bean from one pocket to the other, there's a little psychological boost that says, I'm getting somewhere, I'm making progress. Look, I got 4 nos. Look, I got 6. Look, I got 10. Look, I got 14. Right? I mean, there's a certain amount of reprogramming that goes on to when you start thinking that no is good and you start taking the pressure off of getting the yes. See, everybody goes into sales— not everybody, but most people— they go in and they think their objective in that singular sales call is to get the customer to say yes. They go in with a go-for-yes mindset. And a go-for-yes mindset, nothing wrong with it, except it can put a tremendous amount of pressure on both parties, on the seller and on the prospect. The seller feels, I've got to make this happen because yes is the goal. And if I don't get a yes, then somehow I have failed. And then the prospect is sitting there saying, boy, this person's really pushing really hard. You know, they must be desperate. You know, they almost seem panicked about it. And that pressure is not a good thing. If you go in and you go for no and you say, they may say yes, and they may say no, and no is a perfectly acceptable answer. My job is to explain the product or the service, to explain the features and the benefits, the price points, to listen to what they say, and make sure I'm presenting it honestly. And then lean back and say, what do you think? Now, I don't mean that specifically, but metaphorically. And let— and if you've done the good job, the people who want it will take it, and those who don't, won't. That would be the perfect environment of selling to where there's no pressure on the salesperson and there's no pressure on the prospect who's being sold to. And if you can get that pressure out of the system, then there's a closeness between the salesperson and the prospect that can't exist otherwise. Right? It now just becomes a casual conversation instead of this adversarial conversation. So Go for No serves lots of functions. It's a— I told Andrea when we first wrote the book, I said, you know, the minute people get the book and they know Go for No, increase your failure, I said, the cat's going to be out of the bag and no one's going to want anything else that we have to tell them. And she said, I don't think so. I think this is a multi-layered, multi-nuanced topic. And she was right. There's a lot of stuff that goes on in this process.

Yeah, you're so right. It is. Business is— business is really hard. And it gets harder. And there's depth and nuance, right? I mean, there's just— there's just not a take it off the shelf, business is a bathrobe type thing. You know, there's just so much depth and nuance to things that sometimes we gloss over and don't realize. No, it actually takes some time. In fact, that's actually a great segue into my last question, Andrea. And that is, for someone who picks up the book, reads it, has their team read it, and begins to start to recalibrate their mindset towards this— excuse me— Go for No philosophy, what's the biggest, uh, pitfall that you've seen to where, you know, somebody's really fired up about it but then they don't have the immediate success that they're looking for from it. And it doesn't— or maybe they just don't even structure it the right way and it kind of falls flat and then they kind of drift away from it.

Hmm, such a good question. Two things I see. One is people read the book and they get very excited and they commit to getting 100 nos in 3 days or some crazy thing like that. They're like, I can do this. And they set these crazy no goals. And it requires a superhuman, you know, worth of activity. You've got to be cold calling 12 hours a day, and it's crazy, right? And so I find myself more often than not having to readjust people's expectations and saying, listen, what if hypothetically you said to yourself, instead of these great no goals, which I, you know, I know people are excited and that's great, but what if you just got one no a day? What if you just, instead of walking out the door every day at 5, 6 o'clock saying, well, I, you know, talked to a few people, had a couple conversations, whatever. What if you really worked at getting one good no a day? At the end of 365 days, how many yeses would fall into your lap stress-free, more easily without the pressure, as Richard was talking about, So that's, that's the one thing. And I think the other thing that is, is tricky for people is just making go for no a habit. And I, I think the best thing to do is, you know, turning go for no into a habit has everything to do with proximity. I always say you've got your coffee pot on the counter for a reason, because when you wake up, the first thing you do in the morning is walk straight to it. Let's get a cup of coffee. Your toothbrush is on the counter. Because you brush your teeth every night, proximity, it's right there in front of you. If you work out every day, you put your workout clothes on your dresser right there in front of you. Well, go for no has gotta be top of mind. Uh, get a tracking sheet, pay attention, put go for no on your cell phone or near your desk, keep it top of mind. And so that's probably the second thing that I think if the person isn't super gung-ho, right, wanting to get tons of nos, Then you have somebody who tries to do it, but they just, they forget because it's just not something that, that is top of mind.

Right. And I just want to add in that very quickly that we're not naive enough to think that every industry is the same and that all situations are the same. They're not, you know, the Girl Scout who has a universally understood and loved product can go into a neighborhood with her wagon filled with cookies and knock on every door, and every door is a potential customer. And 4 out of every 10 customers, maybe even more, are going to say, oh my gosh, Thin Mints season, I'm in, you know, do you have any lemon cookies? I mean, they're gonna be throwing money at them. And so that's an example of where you have an almost unlimited number of prospects. And you can get 10, 20, 30, 50 nos a day. I mean, it just— that's the way it is. There are other industries where you work for a company that makes airplane parts, and there's only 4 companies in the world that are your customers. Boeing's one of them, and you just can't go in there and screw up that call. Yeah, the quality of the call is going to matter. Your quantity of calls are going to be significantly reduced. So we understand this quantity-quality issue has to do with how many prospects there are available. And can you just say, oh, they said no, I'm moving on to the next one. But in some industries, there aren't any next ones, or there aren't a lot of next ones. So we want to make sure that we don't leave this call with people thinking, okay, my no goal should be 1, and if I can get 1, then I'm going to— it's always industry-specific, product-specific environment and timing. Right now we're in a economy where it's changed the numbers for everybody. And so there is more nuance to this. But generally speaking, there is no doubt, and Andrea is right, if you can just get focused on getting more nos in whatever the number should be in your particular situation, the yeses will come. They'll come more automatically. And sometimes when they come, they'll be a surprise. And it's a— it's kind of a nice surprise to open the package and find there's a yes in there.

I love it. Well, other than people going and picking up the book, um, where else would you point them to? People are going to hear that we talked about depth and nuance. They're going to want to reach out to say, hey, I'm going to read— I've read the book, I want to really install this into my business, into our culture, and make it a philosophy that we adopt because I've bought into that, I've bought into that concept. Andrew, where would you point them to?

So, uh, yeah, we've, we've kind of created a path, um, on our website at go4no.com. We encourage people to come in, uh, we have a 20-question assessment that they can take, uh, definitely read the book. And then, um, at go4nocourse.com, which they can find at our website as well, we've got an online course and that gets you entrance into our private Facebook coaching group where every single day I am in there, Richard is in there, um, with some kind of motivation, and that, that's really for that top-of-mind, uh, stuff. It's some kind of strategy, some kind of tip. I do interviews once a month with experts, uh, that are synergistic with the Go 4 No philosophy. So we would highly recommend that people, um, come take the course, right?

And notice she said no-tivation, not motivation. Yes, no-tivation. We don't miss a trick here.

I love it. I love it.

Andrea, Richard, this has been great.

Hope to have you back on in the future.

Thank you, Bradley.

You know, uh, there's always 2 or 3 big takeaways that I have from, from every episode. Uh, I think the 3 biggest ones that came out of this is number 1, is that you can't have success without failure. You just can't have one without the other. And I think that we know that intellectually, but it's another one to really truly embrace what that what that means. I think in, in our hardest times, we learn the most about ourselves and our teams and our businesses. Wish it wasn't that way, but that's certainly the way it is in life. Number 2 is how do we and our teams, how do we internalize no? Do we begin to think that they're rejecting us, that they're saying no to us, as opposed to saying no to the policy, the product, the service, the program that we have to offer. And then lastly, the thought process around setting no goals and why we should do that, and then celebrating those goals along the way. I really encourage you to pick up the book, go and also go to their website, check out the assessment, go4no.com. I really enjoyed that conversation with them and hope that you picked up a lot, enough for you certainly to pick up the book and go and take their assessment. And begin to consider that philosophy for you and your business. You know, I'm actually curious for Coach P to listen to this podcast and see what his thought process is on it and, and how he would interpret it. So we'll have to have David on and I'll ask him kind of his philosophy around go for no. But regardless, you know, you want to develop your team, you want to be able to, to pour into them on a consistent basis, but sometimes it's hard to come up with the content and know the the structure. And you don't want to just throw that off to the side and say it's not your responsibility. It is yours. But sometimes getting an outside perspective, even if you're saying the same thing, if your team is hearing it from someone else, it becomes even more valuable. I certainly know that in sports, as you're coaching your son or your daughter, and they hear the same thing from someone else, and they immediately pick up on it, um, better than even though the— you were saying it. I'm sure many of you had that experience. So go to coachpconsulting.com mention that you heard about him on the Club Capital Leadership Podcast, and you'll get your very first month free. CoachPConsulting.com. Just before the recording with Andrea and Richard, uh, for this podcast, I had the pleasure of talking to Matt Jones, a founder of DirectClicks, and we were talking about his company, and we're talking about the growth that they've had, the success that their clients have had, and then we ended up actually talking about, uh, Rock Solid Assistants. And, uh, you know, one of the things that he brought up that I don't think that he'd mind me mentioning this was he said, you know, um, I, I have thought about this. I do think that I'm at this place where I want to consider looking at, you know, maybe getting an assistant, but I'm just not sure exactly where to start. And so I gave him a few things for him to consider around scheduling and emails and school board tracking, data tracking things for his team, meetings, that they could— that person could begin to prepare for. Uh, and then there's all these auxiliary tasks, these things that come up, you know, one-off, um, that that person can do, whether it's even in, in your business or, or personally. And what that led into was a conversation just around how solid Rock Solid is in, uh, the way that they onboard you and the care that Tracy and her team take in trying to find the right fit for where you are and kind of where you want to go. And, and, uh, I shared with him my experience that I'd had with another company years ago, and then how different that, that was with Tracy and her team. So if you have really kind of bought into the idea that the best use of money is to be able to buy back your time, and you know that it was actually— I think Richard mentioned, um, about income-producing activities— that, you know, you need to be able to focus on the things that only you can do. Dan Sullivan calls it unique abilities. Well, there's only a few things in the business that only you uniquely can do. And I think that oftentimes we just kind of hold on to— we grip the steering wheel so tight, we kind of white-knuckle the business. I'm certainly guilty of that myself. So even to this day, and sometimes it's— it is hard to let go, but maybe the first step is just to take the next step. And that is to go to rocksolidassistance.com, reach out, book a, book an end discovery call, uh, with Tracy and her team and see if that's maybe something that you've considered, um, at some point in the future. I think fractional team members is definitely the, the way that things are going. Um, there's so many companies out there servicing insurance and other industries to be able to help you to scale your business but not have to do it with full-time employees. And having an admin, administrative assistant Um, is definitely one of those. So go to rocksolidassistance.com, and if you want to reach out to Matt and their team and talk to them about how they can help you with your online presence and to be able to get more qualified, better warm leads into your business, and then, um, uh, so that your sales team has a better chance of converting— they're not going to be 100%, as we obviously know— but to give yourself a your sales team a chance to be able to convert more, go to directclicksinc.com. Directclicksinc.com. I too, just yesterday, was talking to a group of business owners, and we were talking about— we're talking about financials and this idea of sitting in the cockpit of our businesses every day. And, you know, we walk in there and we know how to read some of the dials But some of the dials we don't. And I think some of the dials, you know, for me in my own journey, uh, was a finance degree from Auburn University. Many of you may, may know that. My dad's a small business owner, so I had every reason. I did well in school. Um, I say that just to simply say that I fell flat on my nose. I had no idea what I was doing, um, to be able to read the financials in my business. Um, I couldn't read an income statement, a balance sheet. I didn't know what a balance sheet was, um, and I certainly didn't know exactly what a cash flow statement was or how to read it or how to use it in my business. And, um, you know, those are skills. I think it's requisite skills. I think it was Warren Buffett said that the language of business is accounting. And I struggled with accounting in school. And it's not to try to make any of you to be bookkeepers. I mean, you're great at what you do, uh, or to become an accountant. You need that level. But at the same time, uh, it is a, it is a skill, um, that you can learn, uh, even if you're not a numbers person, to be able to not just look at all the sales targets and the numbers on your dashboard there, but also to be able to use your financials, uh, to make better decisions. And what I mean, like, if you're going to hire a sales team member, uh, you're going to bring on an executive assistant, You want to know what's the impact? Do I have the money to be able to do that? Can I invest in this? Um, what's our cash flow look like? And using that along with the analytics and the data that Club Capital gives you, which is just second to none, um, out there— nobody else has that type of data that they have and that many clients that's on their platform to be able to help you kind of see here are the best practices. And business isn't a bathrobe. It's not one thing that you can just, um, you know, apply what somebody else is doing in another state, um, another, you know, part of the country. But there are some— I think it was Andrea said— timeless principles. And, you know, understanding your financials is certainly one of those, and it's a skill that you can develop over time, um, so that you can use that and it becomes something that you don't look at just once a year but something that you get into the rhythm of looking at on a monthly basis. So go to club.capital, book in a demo, talk to somebody on the team, and they'll dive into your situation and kind of your background and, you know, what you've been doing up to this point. And this is kind of another example of helping you to be able to buy back your time so you can focus on the things that only you can do. club.capital. All right, everyone, grateful for all of you, um, and grateful for Richard and Andrea coming on the podcast. Look forward to hearing all of your feedback on this episode and check them out. Go to go4know.com. All right, everyone, thanks so much. Happy to help.

So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world yet still remain profitable?

That is the question. In this podcast will give you the answers.

I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

Hey, before we get into today's episode, did you know that Club Capital is the largest accounting and advisory firm for insurance agency owners in the country, providing monthly accounting, CFO services, and tax preparation?

Check them out at club.capital.