Demand-side sales and innovation can unlock huge growth opportunities by understanding your customers’ Struggling Moments, their Jobs To Be Done and their 3 Motivations for Progress. Professor and Subject Matter Expert (Bob Moesta)

G' day and welcome to the Grow It Small Business podcast. I'm your host, Troy Truan. Each week we speak with an owner who has grown a business with five to 30 team members to something bigger. Diving into their numbers and unearthing the pain they've experienced, we explore what they did to overcome each barrier and what they would do differently from day one. Let's get into it. Welcome, everyone. Today we're breaking from the usual format and speaking with a subject matter expert on Demand side Sales. I'm interviewing Bob Mester from the rewired group on Demand side Sales. Thanks for your time today, Bob.

Thanks, Troy. Thanks for having me.

Let's start with how we know each other. So someone in PR from your publicist reached out a few weeks ago and suggested you might be a good expert to have on the cast. And I jumped at the opportunity straight away because I'm a big fan of your work and I knew you had a book coming out which launched 22nd of September from memory.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm not really an author, per se kind of thing. It's one of those things where it's like I was pleasantly surprised, but I've got a lot of experience and I've got a lot of things in my head and I found a process through Scribe Media to help me kind of extract it out and turn it into a book form and it's turned out fabulous. So it's working great. I've got actually three more books already coming.

That's great. And this book's called Demand Side Sales 101. Stop selling and help your customers make progress.

Yeah.

And also just started going through all the Strategizer framework and noted that you are attributed there for some of that work, with which I'm sure we'll talk about today. Jobs to be done and the three motivations of progress. It's a phenomenal framework to use for small businesses, particularly wanting to grow.

Yeah, so I've been. My background is I've basically been building product for the way I always say is, I've been breaking things for 50 years. I've been fixing things for 45 years, but I've been building things for 30 years. And I've actually worked on and kind of helped launch over 3,500 products, like everything from I worked on the guidance system for the Patriot missile. I worked on craft macaroni and cheese in the powdery cheese sauce. I've worked on base camp and just about everything in between. So it's one of those things where was a Little too creative as a kid and I have three close head brain injuries and I can't read and write. And so I just, I learned by putting things together and doing things and building things and I just haven't stopped.

That's great. And you sound very creative. You said before we started recording you've started seven companies yourself and top out about 50 million and then that you leave it there and let other people run it.

Yeah. I love the small business part. I love the startup kind of the small kind of try to figure things out in the market and then building it and standardizing it and kind of then passing it to somebody else to kind of who knows how to manage and run. I would say I'm not a great manager, but I'm a hungry creator. And so it's one of those things where my business partner for 17 years is more the scaling person. And so we found each other, like I said, about almost 20 years ago. And it's one of those things. We worked apart for four months and we decided we'd never do it again in our lives.

Oh, great.

You're based in beautiful Grosse Pointe, Michigan, on the east part of Michigan there where the movie Grosse Pointe Blank was filmed, I believe.

Yeah, that's right.

John Cusack.

We're just outside of the city of Detroit, so yep, kind of the Motor City. We're still in the cars and still into racing and kind of all that fun stuff. But there's just so many other things out there to go build. So it's been a fun time.

Great.

Well, tell us a bit about your background experience. Maybe start firstly with how people can get in touch with you. What's the best avenue?

Oh yeah. So one is LinkedIn is probably the best way to get ahold of me. Twitter. I'm going to be Mesta and then always go to the website. It's the rewired group. It's a very small firm. It's my seventh startup. I had it as big as almost 50 people and I've scaled it back down to five because at some point I was managing more people and selling and I like to actually do work. And so it's one of those things. Whereas I. I literally helps people kind of get placed and then I basically shrunk it down. And now like the last two days, you know, I did interviews. I've doing the middle of analysis. I got another. I'm literally doing like six projects in two weeks. So it's just kind of amazing. So I'm a little frantic, but I love the work.

Sounds like you're loving life and the work.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I started as an engineer and basically started automotive business and then basically moved to the defense industry and then the food industry mostly helping people develop products and then basically becoming an entrepreneur and taking my own products and bringing them to market and then basically selling them to bigger companies. Ran a small private equity firm and then built houses here in. Somewhere in there. Here in Detroit, and then ran a software company and then came back and I was helping Clay Christiansen with a couple of projects. And I really enjoyed kind of the consulting and teaching space. And so I've been doing the Rewire group for just about 10 years or maybe 11 years now. And it's one of those things I've been able to reinvent myself. We've got. We've been building software products. I've been starting to write books. And so I still have this notion of building product, but it's now all these different forms and different things. And so like I said, I'm a builder and love to make things.

Yeah, great.

Pretty impressive educational background, Bob. Mit. You did your mechanical engineering and a year or so after that did an exact MBA at Harvard Business School.

Great.

And just to top it off, you did a master's of science at Stanford University a few years ago.

So, yeah, the D school. So everything was like a lot of it was this whole notion of how things connected. And part it was because I was in so many different industries. I started with electrical engineering undergrad and it was about like I was doing mechanical and chemical stuff. So at mit I was able to work with Don closing there and take some classes and do some work there. But then I realized, like, at some point I didn't know the business side right. And I didn't know the. And then I ended up interacting a lot with designers and ux and it was like, okay, I didn't know that side. And so most of it was just learning to make sure I could communicate with the right people. And I talk about as like horizontal skills, right? Like we have these vertical skills, but there aren't many people who teach about these horizontal skills of how to connect the different parts of the organization. And small business knows it best because at some point you got to wear so many hats, you got to know all these different things. And so really good, you know, I'll say small business owners actually appreciate this notion of these horizontal skills. And I can be an accountant in one hour, and the next hour I can be the salesperson the next hour I can be the running the lathe in the back.

Yeah, absolutely. And you're giving back in the education. You've got a real thirst for knowledge and learning, but you're also giving back your adjunct lecturer of executive MBA at Northwest University or most people would know it as Kellogg School Management.

Yeah, the Kellogg School.

Yep.

Yeah, that's great.

I also teach at MIT and Harvard and then I just did some work at Emory. I've got something at Columbia coming up and so I guest lecture at these other schools and then at Kellogg. We're building kind of the. I'm taking a lot of the tools and methods and techniques that I'm building and kind of wrapping them in their entrepreneurial school. So like the demand side sales book is used in Craig Wortman's class. And so I've got another book called the Learning to Build, which is about the five skills of an innovator. And there are different skills that I'm building kind of a class around that as well. So it's. The educational platform is forcing me to kind of cod and make explicit a lot of the stuff I just do intuitively.

Yeah, great.

Maybe. What are some industries and brands you've worked with?

So I've been working with the guys at Basecamp. So Jason Fried wrote the four of the book. So I was working with Basecamp for 10 years.

I'm a big fan of Basecamp. They started out as 37signals. Chicago and Copenhagen, weren't they?

Yep.

Now I think DH is out and he's in California. And to be honest, Ryan Singer, who's the head of strategy there, he's. I think he's become one of my best friends. And so we talk almost daily, which is kind of fun and so always kind of helping them and that kind of stuff. But we've worked in places like mailchimp and in the software world we've worked at a lot of the, I'll say some of the QuickBooks that work with them. But at the same time I've worked on cleaning products, bathroom cleaners, home design and architecture. There isn't really an industry I haven't worked in. There's industries I actually hate, which is like insurance. Any of those kinds of fear based kind of underlying mechanisms. It's not that I don't understand them. I just feel like they're taking advantage of people and I appreciate that they're good mechanisms, but it has a high propensity to push things too far. So. But otherwise I've sold countertops. I've sold home products. I've built home products like Home Depot. I have stuff that you'd find in kind of the big box stores like that. To be honest, when you read the book, you'll find out the one thing that I'm like, fascinated with. The struggling moments. Like, I remember sitting at the post office at one point in time and realizing, like, why do I have to stand in line to send this box? This is the craziest thing. And so then I went and found out kind of like who's the head of innovation at the post office? Went and basically, you know, kind of talked to them about it and then went and found jobs and then helped them come up with the. Here in the US we have like the flat fee box. This is like in 2000. Like, look, I'm going to buy the box and you can put bricks in it and I'll still ship it for this amount. Like, that's what I need.

That's great.

Very good.

I'm always looking for struggling moments and where people struggle and how to overcome struggling moments, because I think that's the seed of all innovation is that notion of the struggling moment.

Yeah, I've never heard it framed that way, struggling moments, but that's a very good way to think about it. And can you outline for the audience what demand side sales is?

Yeah. So I think part of this starts as the fact this is like when you go to business school and you learn everything around business and you realize there's no sales class. Like, what's up with that? Like, there's a marketing class and there's a finance class and there's a HR class and they're like, there's all but like sales. And having done seven startups, you realize like, sales is the hardest part of any business there is. So I started with talking to Clay, who's one of my mentors for a long time about him. Like, why are there no sales professors? And he basically, there's primarily because there's no theory. It's just a set of techniques. You just learn product and you learn a bunch of sales techniques and you put it together and it goes in a process. There's nothing special about it. I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. It's the hardest thing in the world.

It is.

And so when we started to unpack it, I realized like this process of jobs to be done, which is people don't buy products, they hire them to do a job in their life, which is the frame I've been wrapping around innovation forever. Turns out I can apply that to sales. Like most people talk about how to sell something, but all of sales should be rooted in the aspect of why do people buy things? And so demand side sales is like, let's start the entire sales process by understanding why do people buy. What causes somebody to say, today's the day, I need a new mattress. Today's the day I need a new lawnmower. Today's the day I need a lawn service. But nothing is random and everything is caused. And we end up thinking about, I've got a lawn service, who wants to buy it? As opposed to understanding what causes somebody to say, today's the day they need it. And so it's flipping the lens on sales to say, like, stop trying to push your product and understand how to help people pull your product into their life. And so most of the time, we have product and we put the customer in it. And I try to think about it as like, no, I have the customer. How do I fit your product into their life?

Yeah, the job's to be done. Concept's great. And I love that quote in the book from Theodore Levitt, the professor of Harvard Business School. People don't want to buy a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole.

Yeah. So when I was at, I worked in Japan for a while right out of school, and one of the things I learned was something called the five whys.

I love the five whys.

It was one of those things. It's like, why do I need a drill? I need a hole. Why do I need a hole? I need a plug. Why do we need a plug? I want a lamp. Why do I want a lamp? I want to read better. You know what? I'm going to go invent the Kindle.

Yep.

Right. And so we spend so much time thinking about the drill instead of why they needed the drill, that we actually lose all the opportunities to actually figure out where the real innovation happens.

Yeah, absolutely. And this topic demand side sales. Why is it important when growing a small business?

To be honest, I feel like the marketing and sales community has kind of led us awry in the context that we feel if we talk about features and benefits, enough people will buy, and if I discount, enough people can buy. And we just don't actually take the time to actually understand what causes people buy. The craziest thing to me is this is that it's the end of the quarter and I'm behind on my numbers. And I call it. The church of finance would say, ooh, we need to close a Few more deals. So I'm going to give you permission to give a 20% discount because of a guess I made six months ago. And yet the customer is literally going like, well, I'll pay full price, but I just can't get it done that fast. And it's like, well, if you do it faster, it's like, oh, we turn them into behaving that way. And the fact is what we also do is we activate people to actually want discounts because they think it's part of the deal.

They become trained into waiting for that discount cycle to come around.

So I think that's the first part of it. The second part is when we over feature something and people don't need it, that's when they ask for a discount. Like, oh, this pen can do this and that and that. Oh my God, it's great, but I only need it for this. So like, can I get a 50% discount because I'll never use this end. And you're like, oh. And so you start to realize that when you don't listen to people and you literally just start spouting features and benefits, it actually makes it harder. Like you just feel if I just show up and throw up, they'll get it. There's a big between what people really want because they actually don't know what they want. They don't know the answer. They know the problem and they know the outcome, but they don't know the solution.

I think so many small business owners make that mistake. That old saying of you are not your customer. A lot of small business owners think they know what their customers want. They don't invest the time to go out particularly early on and ask their customers to study them. And that's where the strategizer framework material is really helpful to get you to ask your customers and listen and you will pick up on things to say. Actually I thought that, that they valued this or this is what their buying behavior was due to. And it's not. It's actually A, B and C. Well.

Here'S the thing is that context adds as much value as the product. So for example, like, say like do you like steak or do you like hot dogs?

Yeah.

And most people say, well at least here in the US they'll say I like both. But the reality is like if I actually only have five minutes and I've got four kids starving, the fact is like hot dogs is something that fits in that situation and context and there's no way I'd get to the steaks because they'd eat my arm off.

Giving them a try it all to choose from, isn't it?

Exactly right. Part of is giving the trade off, but the other part is to realize, like, not everything fits in every situation. And there's a great book by Todd Rose, he talks about dark horses. And it's like people don't realize that if I change, I put the same thing in a different context. It actually can have more value or less value. And so we don't actually understand the things that cause value are part of the situation the customer is in.

Absolutely.

That's what demand side is about. Demand is really looking through the customer's eyes, See what they see, hear what they hear, feel what they feel, and realize like. Like it's almost like in time and space where they are and what's going on around them as well. It makes them value you. And most people ignore all of that and just say, oh, they bought the product because I gave them a discount today.

Yeah.

And I think you really set the book up really well with your opening quote. One of my favorite management consultants, I guess he invented the term.

I think he's the father of modern management.

He is, yeah. He created so many terms like knowledge worker and worked with Alfred P. Sloan at General Motors and Henry Ford, et cetera. And yeah, Peter Drucker. I love that quote. At the start, people rarely buy what the company thinks it's selling. And his little vignettes with his, I guess sometimes with his thick Austrian accent back then while he was alive, were a bit Sometimes hard to understand straight away, but let them sink in. Like, communication is what the listener does. And I just think he nails a lot of great points.

There's actually a prequel to that quote, which is like, despite what the business thinks it knows, it knows less than what it thinks it knows. Or it's like the fact that, like, you know very little about the customer because they don't buy what you think you're selling.

Yes.

Like, that whole aspect of, like, the reality is, like, you have all this information about your customer. My favorite is I'm talking to a company that makes windows. And they're like, I know everything about the customer. I'm like, okay, so why are we talking? It's like, well, we just can't seem to piece it together. I'm like, so show me what you know. Well, I know how old they are. I know their house. I know their income. I know what cars they drive. I know everything. I'm like, okay, so what causes them to say? And they say there's 17 million people out there who want windows every year, but only a million buys. I'm like, okay, so great. So you know the answer. Like, no, I don't know why they buy. I'm like, so you don't know what causes them to say, today's the day to buy windows? Like, no. And we go and we literally talk to 10 people, 10 very different people. We find the dominoes, and out of it we find out. It's like, this has to happen, and that has to happen. And this has to happen for them to say, like, today's the day I'm gonna buy windows. It's not one reason or one way. There's four different ways. But when people end up in that situation, they'll buy windows. And so what do we do? We actually start to advertise that way. If you're in this situation, oh my gosh, I could be in that situation. Ye up. Growing sales by 20%.

That's fantastic. So you use those four angles and then join the dots.

That's right. And so part of it is being able to understand what we call the forces of progress. What pushes somebody to buy, what pulls somebody to buy. And then, like, what's the context they're in? What's the outcome they want? But then there's the two secrets. There's anxiety about buying the new, and there's habit about what do I do with the old. And so what we don't realize is that we typically understand the pain in the game, but we don't understand the anxiety and the habit. And so one of the things I did when I built houses, I realized like. Like one of the biggest anxieties about moving was the fact this is like, how do I actually move? I got a house that's 3,000 square feet. I'm moving into my condo that's $15. What do I do with all my stuff?

Yep.

I literally built a moving in storage place across the street and literally said, like, I include moving in two years of storage and a place to sort all the crap when your kids come to visit. 22% increase in sales.

Wow, that's great. Yeah, maybe let's talk a little bit about those three motivations of progress. So it's functional emotional and social motivation.

So I think about it as like, one is, nobody randomly buys anything. People say, oh, there's an impulse purchase. And that's when you really dig into that and you listen. It's like, I didn't plan to buy it. Like, I did an interview with A guy at a mattress and he says, God, you know, I had no intention to buy a mattress. It was last Saturday. I was going into Costco and I was with the family. We're doing all these things, and next thing I know, my wife and I look at it. She's like, yeah, okay, we can get a mattress. I'm running outside, never had any intention of buying a mattress. I'm like, okay, so how long haven't you been able to sleep? He goes, oh, that's been two years.

Yeah, that's a great way to.

You start to realize, like, at some point in time, it's like, it's not random, but, like, if it's unplanned, they call it impulse. But every purchase is cost. When you call it random, random is like the worst word in the world to me. It's like one of, like, in my household, it's like a swear word. Because random means it's like, well, I'm just going to wait for it to happen. It's luck. Like, so I help Clay with a book. It's called Competing Against Luck. The whole notion is when you feel lucky, you just wait. And time is the only resource you really have that you can't save. And so understanding things that are caused or important. And so these motivations that you talk about, the social emotional function, are the underlying sources of energy that cause people to say, I need to do something different than I did yesterday. So we want to be able to understand what they are. And then how do we translate them into the dimension of product, of what do we do? What do we say? How do we design it? What are the trade offs they're willing to make? But if I don't, I can understand that Uber gets me from A to B and that you could say, well, the job of Uber is to take me from point A to point B. But when you wrap the context around it of I don't know where I'm going, I'm in a strange town, the fact is, I don't want to have to park the car. I don't want to really have to walk. You had all these other things. It's like, look, I'm willing to actually pay more money for that than the fact of having to literally, like a rental car. And so most people don't realize that Uber competed more with rental cars in the beginning than it actually did taxis. Cause it wasn't people who were going to taxis or going to Uber. It was people who weren't renting cars anymore who used Uber.

It's funny you should mention that, Bob, because I'm going to Adelaide in a couple of weeks and I was having that thought in my mind, should I hire the rental car from the airport? Or when I'm the next morning, late afternoon when I head off into the Adelaide Hills, get it from the city. And I thought, I just want the convenience of walking out of the airport into an Uber, go to the hotel and I'll sort the car out, I'll pick the car out and sit up in the morning in the city.

But now you have a new struggling moment which is like, well, we've got Covid and like, do I want to get in somebody else's car? And like. And then you have the anxiety of like, well, did they clean the car well? And so you start to realize there's different struggling moments. It's actually the same job. It's just actually now has different criteria of how you, you hire and fire each one because your context has changed.

In marketing, the marketing team can change the copy and the advertising and the words they use to influence behavior once they truly understand the motivations.

Yeah. And so the hard part though is most of the time marketing wants to only talk about the positive side of copy. But almost every time you think about something new, there's a negative side, there's a push that people are talking about and half the time people can't see the positive copy because you haven't told them the problem that you actually or the struggles that you're actually doing it. So like when you're thinking about moving but don't know how to get it done here, we'll get you into your new house and make it easy. Like the whole aspect of announcing the struggle that you don't know how to actually move helped everybody realize like, I'm going to go there.

Yeah, great.

And do you have any other examples of how powerful demand side sales can be for business?

So I was helping a company called Auto Books here in Detroit and one of my co founders is now the head of product there. His name's Chris Beck. And there's two guys, Kyle Bazzi who's head of sales and Derek Sutton who's head of marketing. And we went off and did interviews with their customers and they basically sell a feature set or a bolt on that helps build the e commerce capabilities to banks. So think of like Square and PayPal as like their own thing. It's like they actually have a way in which to give all those capabilities to banks.

Right.

And what kept happening is like I Asked Kyle where his biggest struggling moment was, he goes, it's the demo. Like, we've got this funnel stream. We get people to come in, we actually sign them up, we do a demo and then we try to close and we do this. And so we just took out the timeline from the book and we basically said, look, let's talk about how they buy. And he's like, what do you mean? I'm like, think about what does first thought look like? When do they have the first thought that they need something, and what does passive looking look like? And what does active looking look like? And what we came to the conclusion is they were actually giving the wrong demo at the wrong time and they had tried to pack one demo to do it all when they realized they actually needed three different demos. If I'm in passive looking, I need to talk about language and stories and examples and literally let it sink in. And then when I'm in active looking, I want to see possibilities. Could we do it this way? Could we do it that way? And when they get to deciding, it's actually about trade offs. So you need to say, well, there's three places we can start. And it's giving him contrast to make differences. So at first he's like, this is going to take forever. But he realized that they could build so much energy by having three different demos and literally understanding when they got it that they were able to double the number of people to close. So they almost doubled sales and they have the time to close. Wow. Well, the whole thing is because they end up speaking the language of the bank, where they kept talking about the language of the product. And to be honest, the bank doesn't give a shit about the language of the product.

Yep.

Takes us back to that Drucker quote. People rarely buy what the company thinks it's selling.

That's exactly right. That's why it's the first quote. Because it's even myself when I say, like, I know what you want from me, I have to literally, like poke myself in the arm and go, like, I don't know, stop and listen. Because it might be different this time. And so that's what my partner Greg Engel's really, really good at, is being able to make sure that we're not jumping to those conclusions. And we're listening. And we're listening not only to what people say, but how they say it's how they say it is the hardest part for most people because so if I say, God, your podcast is really, it's good versus your Podcast is really good. Like, the transcript reads exactly the same, but the first time was like, okay, what doesn't he like about it? Because I went down and I was slower at the end and I stuttered a little bit. Well, the other was like, boy, what did you like most about it? And so the next question that I should be asking is very different, though. I said the exact same words.

Yes, I think that's a really good point, Bob, because it's human nature and it bears out in these podcasts, I must say, because I have to concentrate not to interrupt all the time and ask questions and have more of a natural conversation so the audience can listen to you and not me crap on.

I appreciate that, by the way.

It's really hard to do because I think in a small business owner context as well, that bears out in. They don't invest the time to stop and truly listen. And you've given some really powerful examples of what this exercise can do for a business, and it doesn't take that much time. It just takes a little bit of patience to shut up and listen to what your customers are actually saying.

So I'm going to give you a very tangible example. My wife comes down the stairs last Saturday for dinner. We're going to go out. First time we've been out in a long, long time. We're going to go have a distanced dinner meal with my. One of my best friends growing up. And she comes down. I'm like, oh, my God, you look gorgeous. Like, unbelievable. Yeah, I get nothing. I get not even a reaction that the words came out of my mouth. I was like, all right. And we go to the house. We go over there to my friend's house. John opens the door, looks at my wife and goes, oh, my God, you look gorgeous. She goes, thank you so much, and turns around and looks at me, says, see? I'm like, wait, what did I do? So the whole aspect here is that when you start to act, I call this what I call the spousal discount. What happens is that when you have people or customers who are very familiar with you, they say things and you discount them.

Yep.

And so when somebody who's different or new says that, it actually means something different. And if you start to listen and see the reaction of not only what people say, but how they say it and the reactions they get from what they say, there's this notion that when you get familiar with people, the conversation actually changes dramatically. So, for example, I realize I can try to tell my kids something, and they don't listen at all. But I can literally go have my friend John take my kids out for breakfast. And they literally will go like, oh, my God. You know, Dr. Hackenberger said this and this and this is like. But it's for years. And I'm like, I've been saying. But they can't hear it. I don't get mad at them. I just realize it's a phenomenon that designed around.

Yeah.

Most people are trying to. You need to listen to me more. I'm like, why would I waste my time that way? Like, that's been a problem for a hundred or a thousand years. I'm not solving that problem. I just know, like, here, John, here's the five things to talk to Henry about today.

Yep.

Absolutely. It's a great parenting trick. And I've used that a couple of times, that's for sure.

Yeah. Yeah.

But I think it's also with your customers. It's also with. When you have familiar things, they're going to say, oh, yeah, everything's fine. I guarantee not everything's fine.

Yep.

And you don't know it because you're not listening. And they're just going through the motions. That's the thing you got to be careful of.

And, Bob, what's one thing you think small business owners do really poorly in this area?

I think most very good small business people are just there. Like, think of, like, a potbelly stove that's just full of energy, trying to do so many different things. And there's times where you gotta, like, turn the heat off and you gotta unplug and you gotta. You gotta hear silence for a little bit. Because I think the fact is, like, at some point, you can't see some of the important subtle things when you're going 90 miles an hour all the time. And the fact is, this is not like, go smell the roses, but it's like, take two days and go read a book and just, like, unplug. But the book will make you think and give you a chance to actually have the space and time from the business. Like I was. And I'm not the first one to say this, but I would say there's a difference in working in the business and working on the business. That aspect of taking that step back and being able to work on the business, but working on yourself as well. I just think you're so caught up into it and you're the adrenaline junkie of, like, all that stuff. Like, getting comfortable with silence is a really important thing.

Yeah.

And also think building the habit of professional development, which we're about to talk about in a minute. So, like you said, taking that time out, whether it is like, Bill Gates takes a week or two a year and goes into the woods and reads a shit ton of money books. Small business owners obviously don't need to be that extreme. It can just be an hour a week. Go for a bush walk, listen to an audiobook or a podcast, or an hour a day, whatever you choose to invest, but make it a habit.

Yeah.

My favorite is that. And I try to actually replicate this, but, like, so being from Detroit, Harvey Firestone, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford used to go camping for three weeks every summer together. Harvey Firestone's the guy who did own Firestone tires. Right. And Edison, obviously. But it's like, these are three people you would not expect to want to even be together.

Yeah.

And the thing that they loved about each other was the fact that they made each other think. It's almost like there was no ego in the room. It was this notion of, like, I can ask. So this is why Ryan Singh and I get along so well. It's like we can just ask each other anything.

Yep.

And it's like, I have a deep thought. I think it's a stupid thought, and I go like, that's a pretty deep thought. And you're like, okay. And then we literally end up in the rabbit hole, kind of like thinking about it, and next thing you know, we've got a product.

That's great, Bob. That is a great anecdote in history. And obviously, three very successful business people that have seen the value of. I guess it's peer mentoring and just sitting down and shooting the breeze and talking through ideas. Let's talk about professional development. Any resources you'd recommend for small businesses who are owners who are growing their business, books or podcasts or online courses in this field.

So from a small business perspective, I think there's a couple of books. One is, there's a book called Dark Horse. I already mentioned it once. It's by Todd Rose. He wrote a previous book called the End of Average, where he talks about how we've actually kind of caved our whole business or our whole society around this notion of average and grades and classifications and stuff. But he talks about these companies and these people who appear to come out of nowhere, and it's this aspect of, like, people who have been honing and refining their craft, but they were, like, in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then out of nowhere, they end up going to a different industry. And they're like, oh, my God. And next thing you know, they're running the industry and nobody knows how they got there. And so it's a very good book about this notion of, like, the struggling moments that you're going after and that you're honing and refining your craft. You have to realize that context is as important, if sometimes not more important into your success than just muscling your way through it. And so I think it's a great book around that whole aspect of realizing, like, taking a second to take a step back and realize, is there a better context for me?

Yep. Great.

Any other professional development resources you'd recommend?

There's another innovation kind of nut in the notion of called how to Fly a Horse. It's a book by MIT professor. I think it's Kevin Ashton, and he debunks all the myths around innovation. Like, you know, you got to be brilliant. You're going to be, you know, like, Mozart was brilliant. No, Mozart started playing music when he was 5, and it was literally the only thing he did for, like, 20 years. And the reality is, like, it was. He comes back to the conclusion of, like, it's not an aha. It's not an epiphany. It's not about smart people. It's literally about people prototyping and learning to be us failing and learning and innovating and constantly getting back. And it's hard work that most innovation falls behind than anything else. And so my belief is that a lot of people are doing hard work, but they're actually not learning enough, fast enough. And that where you struggle is where you should actually focus on either eliminating or figuring out new ways to do it. Because when you find those, that's opportunities for other people to innovate, for you to build a new product. Like, Basecamp was built out of their frustration of managing information inside the company that then they realized could be sold outside the company. So they were an agency, then flipped into a software company.

Yes.

I love their journey. It's a very light company. We're on to our final few questions here. What do you think is the hardest thing in sales for a small business?

The hardest part, I think, is realizing that sales is much about timing and listening than it is about you. Like, when you don't get the sale, somehow it's like you got to go back in and get the sale. And the reality is timing is actually them being in the right context to see the value of your product. Product is as important. And what happens is we get so Hooked up. And I call it the church of finance, who says, like, you need to actually sell this much by this time to pay this bill to do. Like, we end up not realizing how much sales is driven by finance as opposed to actually being driven by the market making the wrong shortcuts to do that. And so I think that's the one thing. I think the other thing is not that they get lazy, but you end up shorting a lot of things where you're just not listening. You're not really paying attention. And so I think the fact of listening back to listening and hearing not only what people say, but how they say it.

Yeah.

Great. And what's your favorite sales book that you'd recommend people do?

I think Jeffrey Gitter's Little Red Book.

Yep.

I think it was on my shelf 25 years ago. And it's one of those things. I think it's where I kind of learned the basics of sales out of it. I just think the fact is, like the notion of having to push product more than understanding demand is where I went wrong.

Yeah, great.

I'm adding that to my list right now. And final question, what's the one thing you would say to a small business owner starting out in their growth journey on day one?

I would say double down on struggling moments of your customers. This is not about flash and bang. This is about, you know, meat and potatoes and it's about basically making sure you're helping them make progress. This isn't about kind of wow, banging them to get them, getting them in so they'll stay forever kind of thing. It's like understand where you create value and how you help them.

Yep.

Fantastic.

Great.

Well, thanks so much for your time today, Bob. I think the audience will get a lot of value out of what you shared with us today. And I really enjoyed your latest book and I'm going to go back through the last few books as well when I get through a few others. So thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me on.

As a bonus, if anyone has any questions for Bob, email them to me by the end of Wednesday, the 18th of November 2020. I will collate them. Then Bob and I and two other business owners will have a call and run through your questions on demand side sales and innovation. Email me on troy@growsmallbusiness.com by the end of Wednesday 18th, November, 2000 and 20. That's it. Thanks for listening. Please leave a review in itunes or whatever platform you listen to us on. It means more small business owners will find our cast and help people with their business growth journey.