Dominating The New Economy: Modern Sales For The Contemporary Entrepreneur With Joe Semaan

Welcome to the Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, best selling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markell. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your Conscious Pivot.

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markell and I'm sitting here today feeling really, really good. Mostly because I've just found time to be quite creative. The last couple of weeks I've been working on a new book. It's been draining, but it's been a wonderful process. It's a book that's going to come out this coming spring and I'm sort of convincing myself that the process is really going smoothly and that this time around maybe it won't be so painful. So basically I'm lying to myself. But we'll see. I don't want to. I'm also monitoring that little chatter. It says it doesn't have to be painful, maybe it doesn't have to be. So we'll see. And I'll definitely let you guys know. I'm really thrilled. I've got a great guest on the show today. His name is Joe Simon and he's somebody that I think you guys are going to have learn a lot from. I'm very interested in his philosophy. I'm just getting introduced to him, so I don't know a whole lot about him, but I want to read a bit of his bio and then of course we'll dig in like we normally do. Joe Simon is a modern sales expert. I'll talk about what that means to be modern sales expert, new economy keynote speaker and domination mindset coach. We'll dig into that as well. He has mentored over 350 companies in over 20 industries in the last 14 years, including audiences like Microsoft, banks, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Equinox. In many ways, Joe is known as a secret weapon because he's invited to speak on his secrets of selling and domination. So Joe, I'm so happy to have you on the show together to be with you and for us to be together today. Thanks for joining us.

I've been looking forward to this way.

Cool. So you know you've got a very impressive bio. What's not in that bio that you would love for people one Thing that you'd love for people to know about you.

Oh, man. That it ain't pretty. You might love my Instagram post and all the other things that we put out there, but I promise you.

It'S.

About 80% of our time. My time and many others is spent trying to figure out, what did we do wrong? What did I do wrong? How come it didn't go the way that I wanted? And I love what you just said a few minutes ago, that maybe you're lying to yourself as you move forward. You know, I always find myself having to do the same thing, like to trick myself into moving forward, you know, but, you know, the. When they say, you know, love the process of whatever it is that you're working on, I don't know if love the process is maybe the best way to put it, because I can't say that I'm in love with the process of the type of, you know, growth topics that you and I like to talk about, but more so of understanding how important it is. You know, it truly is important to keep leveling up your game, your mindset, your skills. All of the above. And which, you know, leads us to a lot of those domination economy or that new economy mindset that you need to have in order to be a strong individual, professional, provider. You know, all those things going into this new world that we're in. Yes.

Well, we're living in really disruptive times. And if you're not a fan of disruption or if you don't like change, it's. It's going to be a grind. I mean, it's already been a grind for a lot of people, and it'll continue my. Not that I prognosticate too much, but I think it'll continue to be a grind. It'll continue to be painful unless you at least consider what Ram Dass said, which was to make friends with change. I think you're going to make change your best friend these days. So maybe we'll use that as a way to sort of leg into the conversation around modern sales. Roger, maybe define a little bit of that for us.

Of course, I have to walk you through the short version of the story because, you know, like many entrepreneurs or sales professionals, whatever you want to call it, you know, everybody has to be doing some level of selling right now. It's just the way it is, especially with it as competitive as our economy is getting and the world economy, for that matter. But basically, I mean, I spent, you know, the first 16 years of my career in sales inside of A sales position and a couple things fascinated me throughout that journey as I became a little bit more mature. I'm not going to say I became mature, but as I became more mature, I became fascinated with why in my sales career and then helping to lead so many others. Why are there so many ups and downs in something that I practice every single day? And I compare myself to an athlete. If I were an athlete and I had this many ups and downs in my career, where would I be? You know, I wouldn't be in the starting lineup. I probably wouldn't be in the NBA. I probably wouldn't be respected by many, you know, and I'd always have that fear lingering in my background of maybe limiting my aggressiveness or limiting my creativity because I'm wondering when I'm going to be strapped again or budgeting again or what disaster is around the corner. And that's you and I both know, and hopefully most of our audience knows by now whether you're young or old, you know, now that you can't really predict, you know, where next year is going to be. And, you know, I found right then and there, I realized what it was. And it was that people develop their skills far too slow for the world that we live in, and they become romantic about their experience, meaning once it works for them, they tend to get attached for what works for them. You need to realize in the new economy that what works for you is probably for a temporary period of time and more importantly, to anticipate where you think things are going or at least be prepared, as you like to say, pivot and add to your skills, add to your network. Don't be so emotionally attached to something that previously made you successful or something you read in a book 10 years ago or whatever the case may be. And the one skill that we don't think tap into enough, and we probably never will unless Elon puts a chip on our brain or something, is we forget how fast we can learn and how good we can get quickly. We forget that. We forget that the thing that makes us human is how fast we can adapt, you know, and the fear of change is constant. There's nothing wrong with that. But to be willing and ready to accept the fact that constant change, constant adaptation is now either a part of your life or it's not. And if it's not, the next three to five years might be really, really challenging for you.

So to be a modern sales entrepreneur, let's say, or someone that utilizes modern sales techniques, is that. Does that mean somebody that knows how to leverage uncertainty. Leverage the power of uncertainty or leverage resiliency. What. How would you, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

What's a signpost, let's say to somebody that's. That can do those things.

Yeah, man. People ask me all the time, like, what exactly do you mean by modern? You know, are you just using that word because, you know, your popularity is just now growing and you found it to be a great catch piece, you know, hook piece. And that's not really it. It came from, you know, the frustration of me, you know, going through the last big economic shift or pivot period of 0708 09. Yeah.

Brutal time in so many people's lives. That was. Yeah. You know, it's 10 years ago. More even now. But, you know, we can still remember. The blood was. The blood was thick in the water.

Yeah. So fundamentally, you know, like, you know, because of human behavior fundamentally, a lot of rules and sort of associations with sales are still there. A lot of the human, you know, details are still there. What I noticed quickly becoming outdated, constantly becoming outdated, are the tactics in sales. Number one reason for that, Markel, is because people are sold so much that our customers are adapting to how we sell a thousand times quicker. Right. So when we say modern selling, what we're really saying is be ready to adapt your tactics, adapt your language, adapt your questions constantly. Be looking for a more meaningful, more effective way to communicate.

Constantly.

Yeah. Your customers can't see your intentions. All they can do is hear your words. And if you're face to face, you know, some body language too. And you know, what I find in every industry I've been to, every single One of the 20 I've been to, is 80% of their tactics are handed down to them. That's what you do, you know, your parents hand.

So they're playing from a, you know, using a playbook that's been passed down from predecessors.

Yeah. And there's nothing wrong with that. You're still going to be able to do business. You're probably not going to end up in a domination type performance culture or consistent level of paycheck for your people. And the most notable way, the most recognizable way for me to measure that over the past 10 years after being so intimately involved in so many industries, is knowing, seeing that the conversion ratio, their average conversion ratio has gone down over time, so they're not as effective, which means they have to market more, spend more, blah, blah, blah, your company becomes top heavy and you become focused more so on how do I build my brand, which is important. How do I market my product? Which is very important right now. But if you're a high level consulting type industry, not like small ticket items, and the customer is still looking for that consultation or that conversation in order to provide clarity or to help them make a decision, you got to be aware that people have probably been selling in your industry for a while. So your customers finding it very difficult to, you know, who do I choose, who do I go with? Because their mind can't differentiate very well between your approach and my approach. And so people tend to lean into their product, brag on their product, educate their product. And what you're doing. In the new economy or now the domination economies, when you lean into your product too much, you're actually inspiring your customer to go shop, actually inspiring them to go research. Even the, even the rule educate your customer was created prior to the Internet.

So you use that word domination, and I'm in the domination economy. A domination mindset. What distinguishes that word? Like what does it mean in today's context?

Yeah, what it means is, you know, to be competitive is probably a fair play, is probably a safe play, but to be in a domination mode means that you're probably four or five steps ahead of everybody else. So it really comes back to accelerated learning and adaptation. Whether it's an organization or an individual trying to assess, you know, overwhelming themselves with skills that are not common in their industry yet, sort of being the pioneer or being at the forefront of cutting edge, whatever that is in your line of work, instead of waiting for your customers to demand it or waiting for your competition to try it and then reacting to it. To be in a domination mindset and actually invest time, money and effort into learning things that are going to advance your career, provide excessive value before it's, before it's too obvious, before it hits you in the face.

Right. So it's really about planning for change ahead of change, disrupting perhaps your own way of doing things, your own SOPs or whatever process it is that that's part of your, your, the paradigm of your selling or the paradigm in, in many areas that, that exists within the company that you're either running or the one that you're working in, that you disrupt that paradigm before the market disrupts it, is that.

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, there are, there, there are indicators that you're behind the curve. There are indicators that you know your production's up and down all the time. There are indicators that your sales team has, you know, a really sporadic array of conversion ratios and performance results every other Month, you know, and it's constantly going up and down and you start blaming the environment instead, like oh, people aren't consistent or oh, they don't put in the time or oh, you know, really what you should be asking is how can we massively improve our clients experience every single month? How much time are we developing, spending on developing our people's skills? Where are we finding those skills? It can't all be internal. Unless you have somebody in your company that's constantly, you know, studying human behavior, psychology, modern research, Gallup foundation results, Forbes, you know, all these different things. And innovating. Constantly innovating. You know, we basically underdevelop and under prepare our sales and leadership teams completely disproportionately to what competition is like in the new economy.

So when you go into an organization, let's say to look at what their, what their numbers are, what's the first thing that you're looking for typically? Is there something you look for before anything else?

Yeah, the first thing I notice is that for most companies, they measure their sales, not their losses. So you see whiteboards, you see reports, you see printouts, how many calls did you make? What's your call time? They're doing all these things that they've been taught, but they don't properly expose or measure conversion. So that's the first indicator that I know that, you know, somebody like me or similar, you know, can help them out, you know. And the second thing that I notice is that they're, you know, when I listen to them in their industry, I hear the sounds of selling. I'm able to tell right away because a lot of the industries that I, you know, help, I'm, you know, fairly fluent in. So I can tell, you know, when they think they're a really unique organization or have a really unique product. But when I listen to their sales or I play back their phone calls or whatever the case is, I tell them 90% of the words and the techniques that you use are extremely common in your industry. So I monitor, I'll monitor for a week or two, you know, and then I'll explain to them the psychology of what needs to change. And we'll work on it a little by little. But if your customer cannot, you know, tell that there's a significant difference in the way that you lead them towards a decision and that the many of even the words, even the sounds, the questions, the qualifying, the pitch, the benefits that are very, very similar in your industry makes it difficult for a customer to choose you. And instead what they're going to do is then resort to price shopping. If everyone looks the same, drives the same car, takes me to the same restaurant, orders the same drink, listens to the same music, who do I choose?

That makes sense.

It's uncovering their sales patterns. What are the sales patterns in your industry? Start there and with the most common sales patterns, either eliminate them completely or look for a more meaningful way to communicate those to your client.

What have you noticed in terms of sales patterns that have changed over the course of the last six months while we've been seeing this pandemic unfold?

Yeah, so it really, you know, kind of depends on your industry. As an industry becomes popular, its sales patterns accelerate. So right now, let's take the mortgage industry, for example. Rates are super low, you know, so what's the pattern? Right now the pattern is going to shift much more quickly. Now, what can I anticipate because of that? I can anticipate because that three quarters of the country is going to have a low rate next year, and then they're going to call asking for cash. But when they call and ask for cash, what's going to happen to their rate? It's going to go up. So right now, my customers are forming the pattern of give me the lowest rate, give me the lowest rate. I want a 2%. Right. And so I've got to shift my language to be able to, you know, appreciate and align with those things, but then lead them in a more intelligent direction. So literally, it means if you're still using the same words, the same questions, the same approach in your sales calls this year as you are next year, then your customers are going to expect the same result or they're going to shop the same result. So already, you know, companies will reach out to me and they'll be like, hey, you know, we've already worked with each other, or they kind of understand, you know, how this goes now because of, you know, what I've been preaching. And if they want to have a rock star first quarter, they start developing. Now we started anticipating the patterns that we're going to see that are with.

That are forming, anticipating the change ahead of the change that's going to come.

What's going to have to change in our sales process or in our communication flow so that we can better consult a customer when the tides change.

Right.

Well, it's not as easy. Yeah.

You know, you and I talked before we actually hit the record button, that we both experienced our fair share of challenges in our lives and the ups and downs, including coming out of the last great recession. So let's talk a little bit about resilience. I'd like to get your personal definition of what resilience is and how it was that you applied that definition to picking yourself up, getting back in momentum and creating something out of the last sort of great challenge, financial challenge that you faced.

Yeah, I think, you know, Gary Vee, a bunch of others might argue this, but I think resilience is the fastest way to build self awareness. You know, basically adversity, tough times are the fastest way to build self awareness. It's kind of a game of like, how fast can you be honest with yourself.

Yes.

About what's really happening. And when people lack, you can tell when people lack, you know, going through challenges or at least having to face them or take responsibility for them because their downtime is so much longer, they're so much more reactive. They're much more likely to flip somebody off in traffic than I am. You know, they're much more likely to be too emotional about the normal everyday stuff in life.

Yes. You know, and so you're not suggesting that people shouldn't care about what it is that they get, you know, things that get them upset, they're upset for a reason. So that's, it's not about not caring. What is it then? How do you, how do you, how do you flip that script?

I would say it's, it's the acceptance that that is a profound life. That is a life well lived, is a life full of adversity and challenges and trouble and drama and heartache and financial setbacks. That is a life well lived. If, if you can finally, in this modern luxurious world that we live in, say to yourself, this stuff is supposed to happen in life. When I want bigger things for myself, when I have higher standards, when I have morals, these things are supposed to happen. It's how quickly can I accept it, how quickly can I learn from it and is there something that needs to change?

It's a catalyst.

In other words, I would say it's a major catalyst for growth. I mean, resilience comes from that, that type of experience, you know, and by the way, there are people who go through things all the time, but they don't become more resilient. It's lacking the self awareness piece, is lacking the acceptance piece. It's lacking the forgiveness piece.

Yes.

You know, that you need in order to say, hey, I'm still here. Okay, I'm still here. I still woke up, you know, how long am I going to drain. Draw this Out. How long am I going to use this as an excuse? How long am I going to make my past part of my presence for before I finally awake? And people go through this all the time. I mean, I think one of them, the more evolved things that people are accustomed to is breakups now, you know, it's like you can spot when somebody has just gone through a breakup and has caught themselves. What kinds of things do they do when they're on the Comeback? Where do they go? The gym, new hairstyle, all of a sudden there's a new car. Or maybe they move, you know, maybe they're more vocal, maybe they're more active on social media, maybe. So it's kind of like no matter what's happening in your life, it's just this. It's like, is this a. Is what is this setback telling me? We've heard people say that before, you know, millions of times, you know, what is this doing for you? Not to you, but for you. You know, resilience is a big piece, you know, in business and in sales and in leadership, of course, but it's not, it doesn't necessarily make you successful on its own. What it makes you is less sensitive, less sissy, right. And able to recover very quickly. And I think, you know, this year, you know, is a bit. And who knows, maybe next year too, is a major, major wake up call for just how resilient people are. Now listen, let's have some real talk. We're not going to have all of a sudden the majority of the country or the world become resilient because of this, whatever pandemic that we're going through, right? But for those of you who are listening to this, you're listening to this for a reason. You subscribe to certain channels for a reason. You're trying to pick up information that allows you to progress faster in life. That's what you're trying to do. And this year is a great opportunity for you to find out, like, what areas of my life can I become more resilient in after experiencing what I'm experiencing both emotionally and physically now? What are those improvements I need to have, what planning needs to happen? How can I become stronger?

What do you do daily, Joe, that produces more resilience for yourself? Do you have rituals for certain things? Do you have practices that have been with you for years and years? What's your process?

You know, it's not as if I have some daily ritual that helps me to build resilience. I think what's most important is when I'm experiencing, you know, when my mind that's been, you know, conditioned by the world partially, especially, you know, through upbringing, you learn things, mediocre type mindset stuff. When I find myself slipping, thinking negative or feeling bad for myself or whatever the case may be, the, the, the exercise comes and how quickly I catch myself. Yes. How quickly the, the voice in my head, the new guy says, hey, hey, hey, hey, stop bitching, bro. Remember, you're the one talking to people about catch yourself quicker, make a pivot, you know, change your course of action, release that relationship, you know, learn something new. Who can you talk to that can help? You know, it's more of a catch yourself type process, right? Yeah, you get into daily rituals and everybody's got their daily routine, their morning routines, and I always say to everybody, like, come on man, you don't do that 100% of the time when you wake up, tell people, I don't do it 100% of the time. But here's how my ideal day goes. And I'm okay with that, I'm okay with the rituals and whatnot. But I think what's more important is the self awareness piece, you know, especially in business. Now, I'm not a life coach by any means. I spend the majority of my time mentoring and training sales team, sales professionals and sales leaders or entrepreneurs. And so it applies in that world, obviously, because it's a performance based world. But if you're talking about resilience in general, you don't have to wait to go through something difficult to become self aware of what resilience is.

Well, how would you define resilience inside an organization if you're looking at a sales team? I speak to organizations all the time, same as you. And a lot of them, or a fair number of those organizations have me speaking to their sales teams. And if they've had a bad year or a bad quarter, they can be really down on themselves. And those guys and women need, they're looking for something as a catalyst to perform better, to be better, any number of improvements that they'd like to see. So what's resilience look like within an organization, in your view? Yeah, I mean, in other words, how do you create it? Do you think it's important at all within the organization itself or is it something that, like, you know, like a soft skill? What's your.

Yeah, you know, I think not only is this one of the most important areas, but it's one of the most lacking areas is having open communication with your entire staff. You know, Communicate. Figure out what it is, where the challenges are coming from. Not just in a closed door meeting, but listen to your people. Listen to your people. What are the challenges? Find the common denominators and then you have to come to a little bit of an honesty check again and a little self realization check. Do we have the resources or do we need to bring somebody in? Maybe these things are happening because we don't have a skill or resource or a platform that we need to fix it. Maybe we have to bring in, you know, a mentor like yourself to help accelerate this product to speed us up. You know, maybe it's the fact that, you know, your recruiting process is not what it needs to be. So, you know, the most challenging piece I find, maybe because of egos, maybe because most business leaders don't go through leadership training. They, you know, they basically evolve into that position, usually through sales performance or relationships or having money in the bank or whatever the case may be, is the transparency of communication. Being able to set everybody down, you know, and say, hey, here's some of the challenges we're having. No matter what, we're committed to getting through this. Let's get everybody's input, right? Let's get everybody's input and let's go find somebody who does it way better.

More transparency, better communication. What other things do you think organizations ought to be looking at improving to become more resilient?

Performance accountability, visual performance accountability. Not waiting so long before people are, you know, slipping down the hole, the rabbit hole, and then addressing it for some reason, sales organizations usually wait, you know, to address something and then they try to have this intervention type, you know, platform or period and you know, that type of quick shift and it's not as nourishing, tends to create a lot of problems within an organization. I mean, I'm sure you've seen it before. I'll see an organization that has 25 sales agents. You know, we won't do much work together and I'll come back in nine months and 16 of those people are gone. There's new people now. I find it hard to believe.

So turnover, turnover is a sign of that.

Turnover is a major sign.

That's a big issue in so many companies is that they, that they see high rates of turnover. And so when you see that, that's a telltale for you, what do you sort of want to be looking at when we spot that?

Yeah. So, you know, I'll give you an example. You know, I just started a new relationship with a pretty large organization, a multi state organization in the finance field. And one of the questions that I get is, you know, they show me everybody's production and they'll say, hey, should we let these 10 people go and just recruit new ones? We've been. We've been, you know, giving them, like, it's their fourth chance or fifth chance now and then. I want to look at all the other indicators.