Leadership, Motivating Your Team, and Improving Sales Through Neuroscience with Peri Shawn

Hi, I'm Warren Zenna, founder and CEO of the CRO Collective, and welcome to the CRO Spotlight Podcast. This show is focused exclusively on the success of Chief Revenue Officers. Each week we have an open, frank and freeform conversation with top experts in the revenue space about the CRO role and its critical impact on B2B businesses. This podcast is the place to be for CROs, sales and marketing leaders who aspire to become CROs and founders who are looking to appoint a CRO or want to support their CRO to succeed. Thanks for listening. Now let's go mix it up. Hello and welcome to this episode of the Sierra Spotlight Podcast. This is Warren Zenna, the founder of the Sierra Collective, and again, thanks for listening. Today I want to introduce a great guest. I met Perry Shawn at a conference earlier this year. She was a speaker as well as I. And every once in a while, as I mentioned to you many times, I see some speakers that are just amazing. Aside from her skill as a speaker, it was really also her. The content, like she was speaking about something that's really important to me and that is training and selling and how to develop selling skills, if not even more just better effectiveness skills at anything, right? How. How human beings are able to identify blocks in the way that they perform and improve them. And she stumbled upon a very unique methodology, somewhat by accident. I won't reveal anything. I want her to have the opportunity to share it, but it's a really great story. And as a result, she developed a great business called the Coaching and Sales Institute, of which she's the CEO. And she works with corporations and develops this technology and helps companies improve their sales forces. And she does very well also. In addition, she's also in the process of developing an AI product which, which is fascinating. Essentially, it's like an avatar of sorts. It kind of creates a version of yourself so that people can interact with it and address questions and stuff. I'll again let her explain more. But anyway, without further ado, I want to introduce our today's guest, Perry Shawn. First of all, I'm really, really glad you're doing this because I found when you spoke at the event, the CRO Summit, just your delivery and what you were saying was really interesting. And you know, I love good speakers. And the topic you're talking about is interesting because it sort of intersects not just sales, but also psychology and the way people sort of their brains work. And I want to talk to you about that a bit and also a little more like about you. You know, you seem frankly really fascinating person. So why don't you a little about your story. You know, how'd you get here? How'd you end up running a sales and coaching program? If I were to see you somewhere, and this is. I just hear this correctly, if I were like, bump into you, that's what wouldn't be something. I would think that that's what you do. So it's fascinating to see, like, just the amount of amazing people that enter into that arena. So please indulge us in a little bit more about that.

Well, it goes way back. The short version is I was a high school teacher, and I wasn't. How can you put it? I wasn't your typical teacher. Because I was like, oh, you know, why is it that we only have a certain number of students who do well, and then there isn't the expectation that they all do well? And so I thought, well, let's just test things and see what happens. And I started to play with things to find out what got the students to perform better.

I want to ask you about that first.

Sorry.

I want to ask you about that first before you move on.

Sure.

Why did you think about that? So, you know, this is the interesting part of people is like, most people would go, okay, whatever, but what do you think it is about you that had you not only question it, but then decide that you wanted to try and do something about it? Why?

I guess I have this fundamental belief that everybody is brilliant and we just need to find the key to release that brilliance and whether that's a student. When I was a high school teacher back then, whether it's a salesperson or whether it's a client or anyone else for that matter. And so because of, you know, what I've had the opportunity to learn, I sort of feel a responsibility to help others do well.

Okay, I got it. Continue. Sorry.

Yeah. So in my first year of teaching, I was. I went to teachers college and, you know, got all the great education. And then I'm given a class of 23 students, and 16 of them had learning challenges and they needed the credit. It was grade 12 English, and they needed the credit to graduate. And many of them had actually been in the class before, some of them several times. And I felt a responsibility to get them through what I learned in teachers called to help prepare me for this, what I was facing in the classroom, because often what happens with students who don't do well is they become a behavioral issue. So there were some of those kind of challenges going on in the room as well. And then I remembered, because I was trying and testing all sorts of things, and it wasn't working. I remembered one of my teachers telling me about a study that they did, one of my professors at school. And the study was about body movement and how much body movement could make a difference and. Do you want me to share the whole story?

I love it. Yeah.

Okay. And so I came to class on the Monday, and I asked for a volunteer in the class after sharing the research. So basically, the research is we have two parts of our brain, which we're all very familiar that we see in the movies and the gory horror movies and such. And so these two halves of the brain, right, and the left hemisphere, communicate more effectively with one another. When we have body movement, there's something in our brain called the corpus callosum, which connects the two. And as soon as we integrate body movement, we do better. And it's called whole brain learning. And so I asked for a volunteer and student in the back. He stood up, he said, miss, I'll do it. And I said, jim, if you don't mind, if you can, you know, move forward and back and then side to side and see which one feels more comfortable for you. And he said he tried both. And then he said, forward and back, Miss. Now, to give you a sense, Jim was one of those students that the teachers liked, the students liked. He was just one of those nice kids, you know, big kid, but really nice. And he was actually. He was most of the sports teams, and he was a captain of the teams that he was on. So gives you a sense of who he is. But he was one of those students who was in the class for. This was his third time, and he needed the credit to graduate. And he actually wanted to be a high school teacher himself, but his teachers had convinced him to give up on that dream because he was one of the students with learning challenges. So I said, jim, if you don't mind, just stand still and read from the book. And he read from the book, and he stutter, stuttered, and stumbled over almost everything. And then I said, jim, thank you very much. Now, if you don't mind, move forward and back and turn to another page and read. Let's see what happens. And as he read, it was perfect, absolutely perfect. And he didn't stop. He kept on reading. And as he was reading, he's starting to have tears come down his cheeks. And I looked around at the other students, many of them, same thing. And for the teacher, same thing for me. And so what we did is I arranged to get, you know, sort of there are petals that go under the desk, so now we call them elliptical machines, but we got petals under the desk to simulate that forward and backward movement. And. And Jim ended up with an average in that class at the end of the semester at 84.8% or 7, I think it was 7. And the class average was just over 80% by the time we finished the semester. And Jim actually ended up being on the honor roll at the end of the year because the students would borrow the pedals and take them to other classes. And. And he got a stationary bike at home that he did all of his studying at. And then he got himself into finished high school, got into teachers college and is a teacher today. So I know little things can make a big difference. And I've learned that it's one thing that usually that causes. But the challenge is to find out what's that one thing. And that'll help someone do that much better.

So interesting. So you were able to extrapolate a study about the brain, apply it to your students, and it worked. So my question is, obviously it's a really amazingly cool story, very inspiring one. And my question is being somewhat of a scientist, I'm not really. But somewhat of a scientist, maybe an analytical thinker some degree. How much do you think, and I'm sure you thought about this is anecdotal where, you know, maybe he got a specific instruction to do something in a certain setting and that instruction sort of motivated him to want to think differently. And then everybody else saw it happen and so now they thought that it would work. And then by virtue of thinking it would work, it ended up working more like a placebo type thing.

And you know what? To me it doesn't matter.

So you're saying is like if the sugar pill works well, then great, give people.

But the research that my professor had was that with body movement you can increase two grade reading levels in 15 minutes.

Yep.

And. But what happened in the classroom was much faster than that with Jim in that moment. But to me, whatever it takes to help.

No, I get it. That's a. I love that answer. Who cares? And I agree with you, believe me. I don't know what works either. I mean I talk to people and something worked good. You know, I just happened to be there when it happens, so I guess I'll take the credit for it. So then how did this sort of become part of a business? Like how did you move from.

Ah, great question.

Now you're, now you're A coaching and sales institute. You're not a teacher. So how did that leap take place?

I went. I went. So that started a process for me where I started to question everything in the world of education. And so I started testing all sorts of things.

Yep.

And then part of that process, I discovered, wow, instead of sitting and lecturing a class, if I ask them questions, that students actually perform better. And so way back when, this is about 40 years ago, I understand you.

And I are both got the same.

Amount, a little experienced in life. And so there wasn't a thing called coaching back then. But what I developed was a coaching model, which I didn't realize that's what I developed. And I ended up teaching other teachers how to use it within the board that I was working in. And I was then teaching at large educational conferences. And at one of those conferences, it was a national conference, there was someone in the room who looked different than the other teachers, who's wearing a suit and a tie. When I finished my talk, he came up to see me and he said, you have no idea what you're sitting on. You've got to take this corporate. And I went, no, no, no, no. I'm a career educator. No, that's. And he said, just give it a try over the summer. And he kept on persisting, and he won. And so that summer, I worked with them one day a week and for six weeks. And at the end of the six weeks, and I was simply teaching them how to ask more effective questions. And at the end of the six weeks, they doubled their sales. So he then gave me a referral, an introduction to someone else. And the neat part was that the VP that he referred me to was a woman who was very committed to testing things and was very open to my sort of approach of, well, let's learn something and see what happens and experiment. And she had 700 salespeople. And so it was perfect because they had the ticker tape kind of unit on the wall that tracked things almost real time, not quite. And so I brought on four neuroscience grad students, and I started to do the research to find out anything that we could that impacted a conversation. And when we did, we would then hypothesize whether it would work or not. The things that we thought were best, we would test and see, teach the team, and then see what kind of difference that made within a very short period of time. And so we ended up creating this body of knowledge, and then we started to test it with our other clients to see, you know, did it Work so that they were on the phone, did it work in person? And then later we were testing does this work with teleconferencing? And came down to some fundamental pieces that are common to every single sales conversation. And then of course, I also like to test in different industries to see, you know, fine tune and tweak things.

Yeah, got it. So in that sort of laboratory you were given access to what was it that you ultimately came up with? Was it still the same sort of question type of answer thing or there other things that you came up with?

Yeah, well, and you know, the research did point to we buy on emotion justified by logic. So that's no, no doubt what we discovered was that there are two things that engage people emotionally and logically. And one is the questions and two was the stories. That was something new for me at that time because I knew the power of question, but I didn't realize. I mean, I'd experienced it, but I didn't do the research beforehand. And then we started to test different types of stories. We started to look at emotion in a deeper way to discover that emotions, actually we experience two at the same time, not one at a time. We think we, we only experience one when actually it's two. And so that when you're having the conversation, you want to be able to touch on both of them and particularly in the questions you ask and the story that you share, that we found that if you had one emotion in the first part of the story, then you have the. And we found, because we kept on tweaking it and playing with it in different places and. And then the third sentence of the story, if it carried the other emotion, that seemed to get the best results. And then we also found an interesting thing that's consistent across the board is that when team members speak more than four sentences about their product at a time, they start to lose their. The attention of the prospect or client and the sales actually go down. And so just, you know, interesting little nuggets about how do you, you know, use this in a conversation? And none of it feels like the typical sales techniques that some people label as manipulative. I mean, yesterday I was teaching a group of salespeople about a lot of this neuroscience and putting it into their conversations. And I get them to take an oath. I solemnly swear to sell with the purest of intent. Because once you tap in and know how to engage, it makes a difference.

Yeah, well, I'm on board with all this, believe me. I very much philosophically aligned with this. I've been selling and training salespeople for such a long time. And I've always been of the mindset that people buy because of personal reasons, not because professional reasons.

Yeah. Yeah.

There's no such thing, in my opinion, as professional or logical decision. In fact, I think it's all logic is a way to justify emotional decisions.

In fact. Yes.

You know, I use facts and data to substantiate my feelings.

Right.

So it looks like I made a logical decision. But you didn't. And, you know, this confounds the smartest people. You know, the people that are really, really super smart, they argue this. Oh, no, I put all this thought into it. I made my analysis. I'm like, no, you didn't. You like the guy. That's why you bought the thing, you know, and that's. That's an important one.

Yes.

And I agree wholeheartedly that not just asking questions, and I'm sure you agree with this, is, you know, what questions and when to ask them, you know, and asking the questions is as much important. And I think, too, if I may, that asking good questions is a component of really what I think ultimately sales really is, is. It's a listening exercise more than anything, 100%.

One of the things that I got very interested in early on was trust. And this connects to listening in a real clear way. And it started actually in education because I noticed that some students did well with some teachers and not with others. And so the student didn't change. It was the teacher that changed. And so I decided to do a study with the teachers to find out what they want from their students in order to make the learning go better. And then I asked the students what they would be willing to do if they trusted their teacher. Because I was trying to find the word, because I was interviewing them and finding out what they were willing to do. And it was very interesting that what the teachers wanted and what the students were willing to do if they trusted trust, their teacher were the same. And so it got me, you know, doing some deep research about trust. And what it finally came down to is that there's 50 behaviors that someone can engage in in order to earn trust. And these are ones. I've done the research in the world of education, in business, between leaders and their teams and between salespeople and their prospects or clients. And what comes in the 90 percentile every single time, no matter who we are, no matter what level in an organization we are, is the same thing. And it's listened to me. And so to me, it's like wow, if we only knew that one of the best things we can do costs absolutely nothing. Not easy to do. Easy to say. That doesn't cost anything.

Nope. You know, it's fascinating, right? Because all this resonates with me so much. You know, I, I think about us. It makes sense that our personalities are grounded in our early development because when you're, you know, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, even in your teen years, that's where you learn how to be the version of yourself as you are, whatever stimulus you get. And when you think about it, it's so logical because every young person wants to be listened to. That's their most important thing. They want to matter. You know, they want to be, they want to have some significance, you know, they want to be acknowledged, you know.

Yes.

If you look at young people, the seems like they're almost mindless mind mine too, I'm certainly part of this was my mindless pursuit was belonging just to be part of something. Right. And that means that the way that we communicate belonging is by acknowledging. And the way we do it is through listening to each other. Right. Or you know, rewarding each other through attention and stuff. And it makes sense then. And you know, all of a sudden we sort of like go through high school and then we go through college and we have this belief that we've sort of come through it as adults, but we still want the same thing. It hasn't changed at all because we're really the same at the core. That's what we have probably formulated. We just have a more grown up version of the same thing. And, and I think that if you could speak to that, it's, it's very, it's a, it's, it's a very primal way of approaching people.

Yes.

You know, through a, the, the sort of a pyramid of needs sort of thing. You know, And I think it's really true. And I've recently been doing a lot of training more on this sort of thing because now I'm involved not so much in sales training. Now I'm involved in more complex communications which is, you know, when you have leaders and CEOs who have to bring about massive changes in their organizations and how they have to communicate this to people who have all different sorts of, you know, stakes and things at stake around their relationship to their work and everything. And, and how do you do it? And the opposing side of it is all the mishigas that happens when you don't do it properly. Right. So when you see companies all messed up, you know, and I think I wrote this like 20 years ago as part of this description of my. My work was sort of like, I. I really think that every single thing that happens is in some way a communication. Whether it's a communication success or as a communication failure. You can pretty much point back to everything that happened was like there was some place where someone didn't understand something, someone didn't say something, someone didn't acknowledge something, someone didn't express something, someone didn't keep their word on something, which is similarly sort of a communication thing. And I do think that what. But I agree with you. I. I can sense your sort of nucleus here is like, well, that seems pretty simple. Like, why can't we just figure that one out? You know, we had to go all this stuff to figure out that we all just want to be listened to, you know.

Yeah.

So this is fascinating. And then I also know that now you've built this big sales and coaching organization, and I'd be interested in knowing a bit how it is that you have now constructed this into a curriculum of sorts. Like, what's the way in which is this is deployed?

Ah. So great question. In terms of, I mean, over the years, polished and polished and polished and polished, and then we keep the core of the content, but then we adapt as we learn more details about, you know, if there's something new that puts us in another direction, then we start testing in that area and refine. But basically when how it works is we do diagnostics. My teacher background shows okay. And so I'm doing diagnostics of each level in the organization to find out, you know, what's working, what's not working, what the skill and knowledge gaps are, so that then we design training accordingly. So we design the training for the salespeople, we design training for the sales leadership and leadership in an organization, and then we execute on lining that all up and we find that organizations get the best results when it's not just training, but that when there is training and coaching going on so that it's a combination for the sustainability of the actual results.

Yeah. So I'm gonna ask you that question because I've just had like recently also had the same conversation with one of my clients, which is, I'd like to know how you would define the difference between training and coaching, because a lot of people don't make a difference between those things. How do you see them?

Okay, training. And I'm. I'm broad brushing in a big way because there are many ways to fine tune and, and, but generally speaking, training, generally training is about providing a knowledge base, whereas coaching is about developing a skills based. And so organizations get results because of the skills of the team. So therefore the coaching is an essential thing that you want as an ongoing process. Because if you don't have that as ongoing, then it's wishful thinking that the team is going to do better. And I should define coaching too. Coaching is not a review of results. Okay. That, that can be included in the coaching if you want, but that's only the monitoring the results. Instead, coaching is really about opening the door, communication, as you call it, and being able to know that in that moment I'm not being evaluated. Instead, it's an opportunity for me, as if I'm being coached by you, an opportunity for me to go, you know what, here's how this happened. And it didn't go as well as I would like. And I think I might need some help with this part. Can you help me with that? And so there needs to be a high degree of trust that the person that you're with is not going to use it as part of the evaluation process, but instead as part of my learning journey. And so it becomes. And to me that's a sacred space.

Yeah, you're interesting. You know, you bring up another element of this that I agree with, but I didn't think about because I sort of look at it like training is, you know, really simplistically. It's sort of. I look at it as like a off the court and coaching is on the court, right?

Yes.

You know, I'm in the classroom and I'm learning about what tennis means and what the ball is. And you know what, when it's out, how do you score and where do you stand and what's a serve and all that. But then, you know, you get on the court. I'm being coached now about the way that I'm actually hitting the ball and someone's there live while I'm doing it, providing me with input and observation around how my, let's say, skills or behaviors. I think it's behavioral, frankly, a lot of it, and how I can modify them through recognizing what they are and then improving them through trial and error. But I have to be doing it while I'm doing it. There's a degree of coaching which is like we're. It's scenario driven, it's real driven, it's somewhat tactical. And what you said is so absolutely spot on, is absolutely a very religious experience. If you do it properly, it should be like, between two people whom, like, you're sort of in this trusted zone where you can be as foolish and bad as humanly possible in front of this other person because you know that it's safe to do so so that you'll get the most out of it. In fact, the best coaching agreement relationships any coach has are with people who are completely willing to fail. Oh, yes, right. As opposed to ones that think the coaching situation is supposed to be. I'm going to do my best here. You know, it's almost like I look at, like, people show up the coaching covers like that. It's the same person who cleans up the house before the house cleaner shows up to the house.