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 CRO Spotlight Podcast. This is Warren Zenna, the founder of the Siero 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 is fascinating. Essentially, it's. 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, you know, 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 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 did not 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, the 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 a 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 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 that's interesting. So you were able to extrapolate a study about the brain, apply it to your students, and it worked. So my question is, it's obviously, it's a really amazingly cool story. Very inspiring one. And my question is being somewhat. 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 what you're saying is, like, if the sugar pill works well, then great, give people sugar pills.

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.

Yeah, I get it. That's a. I love that answer. Who cares? And I agree with you, believe me. I. 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. 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 a little experienced in life. And. And so there wasn't a thing called coaching back then. And. 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. He's wearing a suit and a tie. And 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 yes, 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 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 of 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 else, 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 and 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. Yeah, it's fascinating, right? Because all this resonates with me so much. You know, 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 mind and 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, then, 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 until 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, 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 was looking 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. You missed the point. You know, like.

Right, exactly.

Supposed to do that. You know, that's their job. So. So, you know, it's sort of like, you know, interesting. I, I make. And I, I think that I asked that question because I, I think that coaching is a word, but it's lost its punch because I do think it's become fuzzy in a way.

Yes. And it's not because the research shows and I always go back to little nuggets of research that are really, really helpful. And this is Jeffrey Schwartz work, is that we actually, when we ask somebody a question, we actually help them develop a neural network. So we're actually taking two neurons and causing a connection in their brain. When we ask a question, when we're telling someone, something doesn't necessarily happen. Okay. We've all had experience. If you've got kids, you definitely have the experience that you can keep on saying something and it doesn't land. But if you ask questions, there's this marination that happens with the ideas that you're talking about.

Yeah, I like that. Supposedly questioning is a way for you to create the opportunity for someone to formulate their own idea.

Yes, for sure.

So we talk about knowledge, talk about skill, and I agree with you that they're distinct. What about motivation? So, you know, you're training people in questions and answers, but they just don't want to do this. You know, like, how do you, how do you deal with that part? Because that's another whole other big, huge thing is just because someone has a skill set, but if they don't want to get off, off their ass and do it, then it's worthless. So how do you, how did your work go to work on motivation?

Well, I'm going to two things that I've learned over time. One, Is when I go into an organization for the first time, I usually interview several of the leaders. And I've learned over time that the great leaders are the ones who can answer this one question, what's important to each one of your team members? And that's part of the motivation piece I learned as a teacher. And I'm laughing at myself because I tried the rah rah, rah thing for motivation. And it might work for a little bit of time, but it's not sustainable. So what I discovered as a teacher, which I find I just continue through in everything I do is find out what's important to that individual. What we did is we. And when I say we, because I started teaching other teachers how to do this too, is to find out what's important to the student. And then instead of saying, here's the curriculum, we started to get the students to make proposals. And so it was what are you really interested in? This is what the curriculum requires that we do. Make a proposal to me, how you're going to connect the two and then you can write your essay on that if you can convince me. And boy, did I ever get some interesting essays. I was an English teacher and business. And so what I got were these incredible, you know, student was interested in cars and we're studying, you know, let's say west side Story, you know, and so they will connect the pieces within it and be able to come up with a philosophy, etc and a thesis and an argument and all the rest. Much more committed to that than if I had said, you know, go ahead and write an essay on this. And that it's, it has less of an interest.

I see. So you're, you're, you're, you're, you're. I guess your point of view on this is everyone has their own internal sort of things that drive them and motivate them. And if you know what those are, then that's the way that you can get them to become exactly engaged. And these blanket motivational things are they might reach a percentage of people, but not everybody. And if they do, like you said, it's more just changing the temperature in the room. It's not really going at individual things.

Right? Yeah. And then the degree to which when someone is doing or is, and it's not about giving them a different role, it's about helping them connect the pieces together. And then once you do, once they go, oh, this is going to get me what I want and what I love to do, I just didn't make the connection before. All Of a sudden, their commitment and their desire to do whatever it is increases exponentially.

Yeah. No question. You know, and it's pretty cool how closely this resembles the way that I manage my teams. You know, that's an interesting situation. I was running a team at an organization. I was heading a big group of people. And, you know, it wasn't science. I mean, I just sort of figured this out. Maybe just some of the other training I got, which is another whole long conversation I don't want to get into. Right. But it really is about that. It's about like knowing what's at stake for people.

Yes.

Like, what's the. What's the thing that really is most at stake for them? Everyone that comes into work every day is sort of like thinking about. And, you know, it could be pretty similar things. You know, it could be like my family's health and well being. You know, I want to keep my house, I want to keep my family fed. You know, that certainly could be at stake for somebody, but for a lot of people, it's things like, you know, my reputation, my sense of self worth. You know, this job is a way for me to provide myself with the means to feel important or that I matter or that I'm capable. And I think there's also, interestingly, which. I don't know if we have time to get into it, but there are also differences in the way that men and women think about things differently. They're motivated different. Different ways. And so, you know, for. I do a lot of work with men's work, and for men, it's mostly about usefulness. Men like to feel like they're. They're almost. We always look at. Look. Look at ourselves almost like. Like, in a way, appliances.

Mm.

And if we're being utilized properly and we're executing on our kind of useful value, then we're. We have worth. You know, I can lift things, I can fix things. You know, I can mend things, I can move things. I can. You know, there's a lot of that, you know.

Yeah.

And so my husband. Yeah, there you go. Right. And so I'm like that. And so. So there's this almost like a persistent feeling of how am I maximizing my usefulness. Right. And so again, knowing that making someone feel useful is extraordinarily motivating for certain people. Right?

Oh, yes.

And so again, that's sort of a way to start to evaluate and put up, like you're saying, like, put a lens on and say, okay, I'm going to look at everybody not based on their competencies, but what it is that makes them move, what has them burn calories, you know, and then how can I tie that to the thing that I want them to do in some way, and then that'll result in potentially something better.

Yeah. And my experience has been when leaders learn how to do that, the results in their organization increase exponentially. And it's, it's, it's a, it's inspiring to watch.

It is. And you know, it's also sad to see when it's not happening. You know, I, I see that more often. So I have a particular instance right now. I have a client that this company's really like, got a lot of motivation problems, there's a lot of distrust and a lot of things that went on over the last years or so that a lot of people just accumulated, lack of integrity and issues and things. And so now, you know, they're implementing all these new programs. You know, things are tactical programs and bureaucratic programs and systems. And I'm, I'm saying to them, these are all great, but none of it's going to do anything because your people don't want to do anything right now. Like the problem isn't these things. And I think this is, if I may say you're, you're speaking to the notion of emotional intelligence, right? Which is emotionally intelligent leadership. Right. Is that we're dealing with people. And even though we're all involved in these sometimes mundane ventures, right. Not everyone's doing meaningful work like you. You know, some people are just like building weird widgets and trying to get as many people behind as possible. And it's hard to derive some larger meaning from it all because you're just sort of getting a paycheck to help someone build and manufacture some small hockey puck that's being distributed to some place. And you have to find where is your participation in this system motivating you? How could you use this as a way to express something about yourself? And I don't want to sound fuzzy and tree huggy about it, but you got to do this stuff because that's what gets people up in the morning. It just works, you know? Yeah.

Well, here's what I've discovered, which is really how can you. For me, it was mind blowing how simple it was. And that is going back to the trust, how to earn the trust. And listen to me, if a leader. And we just, we saw it over and over and over again and we just went, oh, let's test it and see if what we're Thinking is accurate. We found that if three times, three high, you know, highly focused formal coaching sessions where the leader listened to, all of a sudden there is a major change in the organization. Even when there were trust issues before now, there also was one other part that if there was anyone in the group that was someone who was engaging in behaviors that would be considered emotionally abusive or whatever, they dealt with those, that. That's another issue and dealt with differently. But with the, you know, with a group of individuals who have been a little shell shocked from being in an environment that's not, you know, trusting that if the leaders took the time to really listen and learned how to ask questions, well, it just took three interactions. That's it. And I'm like, wow, that, that, you know, do once a week for three weeks. And amazingly enough, there's a shift.

Yep. Amazing.

Want to trust?

Yeah, yeah, I think that's true. I think it goes back to the earlier part of our conversation, which is at the core, people want to just be listened to and they want to matter. You know, it's amazing sometimes when you have a conversation with somebody like this, you can almost see them reacting like what it feels like that might be like the first time they've had someone talk to them in that way. And they sort of like feel kind of all of a sudden like important. And it, it can be incredibly motivating. And it's like you said, it's free and it's. I wouldn't say it's easy. It's a skill, which is why you have a business. But it's easy in that it makes sense. You know, it's not like someone will go, what? I don't get this. This makes no sense. It's like, okay, I get it. You know, another thing that you had brought up to me that we talked about that I want to hear you talk a bit more about is this AI project that you're working on. Could you explain that a little bit?

Sure. So I was very interested in AI because again, it's another place to test and play and to utilize what we had. And I have over 100 products that I've created. You know, the writer, teacher part of me that created a lot in the, in all the work I've done. So we've created an AI, a custom AI so that it's a generative AI that acts as a sales mentor and partner in that we share with, has all of the foundation of my material and work. And then on top of that, we integrate the client's product information and whatever it is that they want. And then we also put in our special training of the AI because there's certain things that we by human, not by AI to make sure it gives us the outcomes that we want. And then it's a mentor and partner to give real time support to the sales team. It also has the ability, we've trained it because of my interest in data and information and research that we're able to gather data on the. So a team member, if they're going in to meet with a client, let's say, who is a large corporation, it can go through their annual report and other online information.

So it's almost like you're creating like, almost like a, like an avatar of someone's expertise that you could use to ask questions and it'll provide guidance. Guidance, like replicating yourself in a way.

Yes. And then we also have the eye tracking of. So there's. People don't read things fully. They skim and scan.

Yeah.

And so eye tracking tells you where they skim and scan. And so I've put that research that I've skim and scanned over the years and gathered of what works and what doesn't work so that it also will do all the written communication for them based on that. Not not only. Yeah. So it's got a little twist on the research based and well tested that gets people great results. Yeah.

And what's it called?

It's called Neural X. Neural X, yes. So brilliant brain, just in a, in a different language.

Cool. Well, that's exciting. So I, I think it's amazing. So I want to make sure that we're, we're going to touch on some things here. So right now you're running this company and you are essentially applying this particular methodology to corporations and organizations. Is there like a certain profile or type of client that you prefer that you work with or what's the nature of the engagements you have?

If it's interesting, what makes it interesting?

Like how do you make that, what's the way that you determine that.

One that they are committed to making. Okay.

So there's a mindset component to it.

And you know, industries that we've worked in. Yes, we've worked in highly regulated industries. You know, banking, insurance, mortgage. So a lot of those we've worked in construction, environmental engineering. You can see wide range of industries. But we, we do it because we know we can make a difference for people in their workplace. That, that and, and oh, by the way, we get great results. You know that, that's the, the Bonus.

The icing on the cake, so to speak.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, great, great. So your, your, your business is Coaching and Sales Institute.

Yeah.

And you're based where?

In Canada. Oh, so in Toronto area.

Oh, got it.

But don't hold that against.

I know. Great town. Okay, well. And so I guess what, what's the best way? I mean I, I went obviously went to the website and I saw all this great information about you and your company. What's some other ways that people can engage with you? Let's say someone's listening to this and think, wow, this makes sense for my team.

What's the best way to easy way to reach me is through LinkedIn and reach out that way. Or Perry at Coaching and Sales Institute.

Okay. I have a feeling. I don't know the answer to this question, but I'm going to answer it. Let me ask it. This is a kind of closing question that is that let's say you weren't doing this for a living and you had endless limit, unlimited resources. What would you be doing?

I'd be doing what I'm doing.

I figured. I knew you were going to say that.

Yeah.

Because you're doing the kind of thing that people want to do.

I love what I'm doing and I, I really enjoy working with people who are open to growing and expanding and, you know, letting me be a little curious about what can help them do better and testing and finding out what works.

Kindred spirits. I get it. So look, this was great. As I expected. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me and everybody. Perry, Shawn, CEO of Coaching and Sales Institute. And thank you so much for, for being here.

Great, great to be here. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to the CRO Spotlight podcast. The CRO Collective's mission is to help CRO succeed and help founders and CEOs build CRO ready organizations. You can find out more information about our services@the crocollective.com that's the crocollective.com and we look forward to having you join us next time.