"Leading Through Change with Sam Griffard” — Guest Leader Series

Hello everyone and welcome to our guest leader series for the NeuroLeadership Edge podcast. This today, this podcast today, we're going to be talking about leading through change with our guest, Sam Riffard. We're very excited to have Sam today. But let me start with this. Ever been the youngest leader in the room and still had to move a veteran team? I mean, that can't be easy. So today's guest, Sam, Well, he did. And he pretty much turned skepticism into record-breaking revenue. Here's how servant leadership plus brain-smart coaching wins buy-in. I'm Claire Hayek, your host, neuroleadership expert. I'm thrilled to have Sam. Sam, welcome!

Thank you, Claire. I'm excited for this one.

Yes, very excited too. I was really looking forward to this. Let me introduce Sam before we start. Picking his brain on this. So, Sam Giffard is currently Head of Sales and Sales Development at NorthStar. He describes himself as a sales nerd with 2 degrees in sales and over 14 years of professional sales experience. He has helped organizations at various stages of growth establish, redesign, and adopt sales processes that actually have driven hundreds of millions in revenue. He champions processes rooted in human psychology. That's why he's here, backed by science and guided by data to deliver predictable results. So Sam, let's get to it. You're known for treating every sales play as a psychology experiment. So give us the— how did this whole thing start? Give us the origin story. Like, how did your fascination with human thinking Get you into the sale and steer you into sales actually, right? And I'm gonna stop there. I'll let you tell the story.

So, it all started probably in about 6th grade when you had to do that book report on your dream career one day. And I don't know why other than I was fascinated by why people did the things they did and why they didn't do some of the things. other people were doing. And so I was like, oh, I'm gonna be a psychiatrist one day. I'm gonna study the human behavior and communication and all of these things. As time went on, I got further into schooling, started taking psychology classes, communication classes, sociology, all these types of things. And had kind of an aha moment when I was talking to one of my professors. about the counseling aspect.

Okay.

I realized, okay, based on this story, I don't think I should do this. I don't think I should become a psychiatrist. What else could I possibly do? And I was now at business school at the time.

Okay.

I had a few years of being out in the world and came across a side class that was part of the business school. That was a sales class. I knew a couple people in my extended family that were in, you know, in different sales careers. And I was like, okay, sure. Yeah, I'll take this one class. And that's all she wrote. It was history.

That's nice.

From that point on, it was like, okay, this is, this is what I can do with my passion for human psychology and communication. And how excited I get around business and things like that. So, it turns out my school had an associate degree in professional sales, right? I was able to move to another university to get a bachelor's degree in technical sales.

Okay. Wow. Okay. So, from psychology straight to sales, pretty much. And So, how do you find that experience basically having started studying psychology? How does that influence maybe conversations you have with maybe a sales prospect or a team member? What would you say that like, how does it really connect in your day-to-day?

There's 2 things that come to mind right now. One is empathy, just understanding that they are thinking and feeling things as you're having this conversation.

Right.

So if, if you just go full steam ahead, not worrying about what they're thinking or what they're feeling, that's where you hear all those horror stories of people like salespeople are terrible because horror story, they didn't feel heard. They didn't feel respected. They didn't feel understood, seen. all of those negative things, right? The second part would be the communication. You can take very complex ideas and processes for, you know, getting from point A to point B before and after, and you can boil it down to something even a child could understand.

Right.

Or somebody that's, that's not in that industry with a high experience of technical expertise in that topic could still understand it, right? And so I felt like too often people were going into those conversations just like, I, I expect this person to understand everything that I throw at them, and I'm literally just going to dump all of my brain and knowledge and understanding about this and cross my fingers and hope for the best, right?

Right. And usually, correct me if I'm wrong, but what we observe when we're just— it's a one-way conversation. Either the person looks completely lost or the opposite. They're very, yes, yes, yes, yes. But there's nothing registering. And I'm assuming that with your experience, how do you find that? The fact that maybe observing other people doing and other leaders around you. I'm not saying where you work now, in your past experience, or just— Period. People that you know in your network. Have you seen that some leaders are more attuned to their conversation, their agenda, and they don't necessarily take the time to connect? Or they probably don't know how to connect. And I want to get your point of view about that, your observation. Do you see that more often than less often? I just want to paint the hope here. Is there hope? I see a lot of leaders making tremendous efforts. Now, we're talking about it. We never talked about that before, which is a— I find it's a great thing now that at least we're open and talking about it. But do you see that often in your network? Do you feel that that could be a big issue at this point?

Yeah, I had to laugh because yes.

I know you laughed. I don't want to assume.

And it's not just leaders. It's, it's individual contributors and they're learning, they're learning bad habits from leaders.

Yeah.

Too often it's just, here's my viewpoint. I think this is the best way to do it and I'm going to deliver that and drop the mic and just expect you to take all of that and do it exactly the way I told you to do it.

Yeah.

And it's honestly—

yeah, sorry, go ahead.

What you were kind of alluding to is, is it's a 2-way communication. There's, there's some level of— you get the people who are just like almost like deadpan. I'm not even sure if this person's listening, to the people who are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, do you really? Are you really tracking? Do you really understand? The only way to find out is to make it a 2-way conversation. You can't just talk at the person.

Right.

You have to have a conversation with them.

Yeah. And I'm assuming in sales, it's a big deal. I mean, I find in general, again, I don't want to generalize. But what we've seen people notice, the people in sales are gifted to a certain extent with communication. I mean, if you're gonna be not only selling, serving your client, right? Adding value to your client. You need to be able to communicate well your idea and how you're going to solve their pain point. And I find, correct me if I'm wrong, it's not a lot of schools teach that communication. And we assume people know how to communicate where, you know, there's so many different factors into communication. But this is not a communication podcast. I don't want to focus on that. But I think I just wanted to kind of elaborate a little bit on that because I think a lot of our listeners might identify to this and go, yep, yep, we've seen that. I try to express myself. I try to practice active listening. I try not to interrupt. I try to make a connection. It's not always easy. I'm busy. The clock is ticking and we gotta deliver. And so, yeah, so it's an interesting thing. But I think being conscious of this and making that effort will win you in the long run. You'll save yourself a lot of time, in my opinion, right? If you're really taking the time to explain properly.

If I, if I had a magic wand, every— from grade 1 through every degree you could possibly choose at university, there would be 2 requirements that maybe aren't requirements for all levels of education. One of them would be communication.

Yeah.

The other one would be finance. People need to learn more about their money. So, I mean, that's obviously a personal passion, especially with the company that I work with right now.

Right.

Those 2 things, communication and finance.

Yeah. Yeah.

Everything else, pile it around those 2 things. But communication, it's every day.

It's huge. It's huge. And, you know, we've done a— at MSP Team Building, we've done a survey with our clients. Starting with small companies all the way to Fortune 500. And the survey was basically to figure out what put a cost on miscommunication. And we found that the smallest company was, I believe, 20 employees, had 20 employees. The yearly cost of miscommunication and was conservative estimate, meaning that we just X amount of hours evaluated every week that was lost in miscommunication. So, maybe meeting too much or Emails back and forth, etc. So minimum, we didn't even factor in the impact on a project, on a sale. We didn't even impact that number. So bear with me. So, we did the math and we— the number, the cost of miscommunication from a small company of 20 employees all the way to Fortune 500, we're talking 40,000+ employees worldwide, was somewhere between $150,000 a year all the way to $47 million. Now, that's huge. That's huge. Who wouldn't want to improve communication at that point? But again, I just like, that was a side thing. I thought it was interesting because I wanted to hear your take on this. But let's bring it back to your experience. So, Sure. Here's the— I'll paint the scene, right? So, you're a new sales enablement lead. Much younger than most reps, right? And at the job, at your job then at the time. And they're going, what can we learn from this kid? What did you do? What did you do first?

Oh, it was palpable when the leadership made the announcement. Sam's moving from this leadership role and responsibility to this leadership and responsibility. He's going to be in charge of Onboarding, ramping, continued education, process improvement, all of these things. Like he did, he did this over here. We want him to do it with all the roles within our sales function. And I'm looking around and some of the people are like, what?

Is this a joke? Him?

Like, why him? Like, I would've expected maybe somebody from like one of the senior sales leaders to like maybe come over and do this thing, but like, They, they, you could just tell, like, they, they thought it was not the right choice or couldn't understand.

Let me bring you to that, to that point, that, that moment. How did you feel? What was going on through, through your body or your brain? What was going on?

Okay, so I was excited by the idea. I, I felt grateful that I had been seen, that I was— I took over a team And I was able to improve that team.

Okay.

Through just constant iteration and process and just dissecting everything and data and so on and so on. I was excited and I felt seen. And then I see these, these looks on people's faces. And for me, it definitely triggered a fight mode, not a flight mode. I did not Cower in the corner and woe is me. Oh, I shouldn't have done this. This is a terrible decision. It definitely put that chip on my shoulder. Like, I'm, I'm going to prove it.

Right.

I'm going to, I'm going to prove to you why the leadership could see this being a good idea. And I'm going to prove that I can actually make a difference and I can help the team. So it definitely, definitely triggered that fight. I'm going to prove it to you.

Right, right. And how, how did you do it? What did you do first? What was the first thing you did? So you have to approach this team, uh, you're apparently the guy, they are looking at you with skepticism. Um, what was the first thing you did?

Uh, I took the opportunity to speak to everybody. Uh, not, not individually yet, just in the group setting. Like, hey, I'm grateful for the opportunity. My role and responsibility is to help you. Right. I'm here to smooth out speed bumps, remove roadblocks. I'm here to make things so much more efficient so that you can do your best work or where you can focus on the things that mean the most to you, where you see the biggest impact in your role as a salesperson.

Okay.

I'm going to, I'm going to help with tooling. I'm going to help with all these things behind the scenes so that you can continue to do what you do best. Just easier, smoother, more effective, more efficient. And so my whole goal there was, this role is not for me. This is not— this is not an ego boost role. This is not a my way or the highway role. I'm going to come in and clean house and you're going to do it this way. I just wanted to communicate, like, my job and the measure of my success is your success.

Right. So, you clearly did the right move because I'm assuming they got your buy-in.

Yeah.

And on a science, if we just look at this from a science, brain science perspective, the fact that you stepped in with the, I'm here for you, that caused— that was obviously the right move. That caused this this oxytocin spike basically in people's brain going, okay, we feel safe. We're good. We feel that we're cared for. And which literally lowers the signals to the amygdala where basically our high emotions and when we get angry and frustrated, that's where it goes. So in a way, although you didn't think about it that way at the time, you acted instinctively. And this is the beauty of things. Sometimes we just know. But I'd love to kind of dive in and explain what really happened in people's people's brain around you. You really activated their prefrontal cortex and their ACC, which is the anterior cingulate cortex. And what that does, it basically regulates what goes through the panic amygdala and really just signals a couple of things go, okay. Think of it as the brain's traffic cop, right? So, automatically regulated their emotions and it helped them focus. The prefrontal cortex, called the PFC, is pretty much the CEO. And it basically just instead of going to the, I'm panicking here and I'm freaking out, either we hate this guy or he's frustrating us, right? If you had brought another approach, you literally just avoided a disaster, brain disaster, amygdala disaster. So, in that way, you really help them stay focused in their CEO and see, okay, here we go. What are we going to do next? He's got us. We're good. This is going to be fine. So, I think it's important also to understand that the way sometimes people react, don't be very surprised When you're not communicating well or you don't have the right approach, you can automatically see the reaction. And it's literally brain reaction to what the message you're conveying. So, kudos to you for that. I mean, you're really able to approach it in a very subtle way and servant leadership, if I may add, right?

That was the extent of my knowledge was the concept of servant leadership. I did not know anything about the brain science that you just went through. It wasn't, oh, I know the brain science. Therefore, I should go do this.

No, nobody talks brain science usually.

That's my job.

I think talking about the science of things just makes it a bit less, I guess, dramatic. Go, you know, it's gonna— the brain is gonna act a certain way. It's gonna show on our faces. Something's gonna happen in our body. Don't be surprised people get angry because you said a word or two. It's just an automatic reaction. It's biology. But Obviously, we don't— when we, you know, this is the instinct and mirroring and also your values that you bring to the table. And I think that was why not only your performance spoke for itself, but also I think although you were younger than everyone else, you had that way, you had that approach. And I think that is more important than sometimes than skills. You have to have the people skills before you have the technical skills. Because you can have all the technical skills you want. But if you cannot communicate it well, if you don't know how to approach people, if you don't know how to read the room, then you're not going to get through to them. So, which brings me to the next thing. So, walk me through, walk all of us through actually. One of the reps, I believe, was low performing. And that was kind of a touchy thing. Like, how do you approach somebody like that? So, I wanted I want you to share the story how you were able to flip the resistance into somebody that into ownership basically.

Yeah. So, after doing a very deep dive into data to try to find out where we had holes in our process or places where we're just like, okay, this is an obvious— like we can make some tweaks here and adjust some things. We can get way more efficient here. I found that one of the most crucial moments in our sales process was our discovery calls. It's the first time a prospect gets to have like a, a really in-depth conversation at length with one of the account executives.

Okay.

Where it's really that back and forth, like we're learning kind of what your current state is. We're giving you an idea, just a small glimpse into what your future state Mm-hmm. Based on examples that we're sharing with you from your peers and our clients. And the data continued to show that there was, to your point, this one rep that had basically a hole in the bucket. No matter how much water, or in this case leads, we were putting into that bucket, it kept on leaking out at the top.

Mm-hmm.

Because of that discovery. I started to go and watch recordings, listen to these calls. I went and actually sat in with other people that were in these meetings and asked them, hey, tell me about these meetings, tell me about how this rep runs these things.

Okay.

And this rep was a veteran, literally had been in the industry for over 20 years.

Okay.

Multiple organizations. absolute expert. It would— at first you're looking at these call recordings, you're going, what's wrong?

Right.

Like everything, everything looks awesome. Like knows this, this industry inside and out, knows the prospect's like life, right? Day in and day out, inside and out. Can explain that really before and after story beautifully, can share client stories. What's the— what's the issue?

Right.

Get to the end of the call and it was the close.

Okay.

It was a, all right, we've had this wonderful conversation. Uh, where do you want to go from here? Or sometimes it was even worse than that. It was, why don't you go talk with your team and, uh, you let me know when you want to get back together and continue the conversation.

Okay.

From my experience working as an account executive, working with account executives, looking at what great looks like, looking at other organizations' data on how to close a discovery call, I knew that was not best practice. That was literally the exact opposite. Now that I had this information, what could I possibly do with it? This, this rep was literally 20-plus years more experience than me in the industry, right? Older than I was. Yeah, veteran.

How do you— how do you—

how do you do—

how did you say—

How am I gonna go to this rep? Yeah, so I knew I couldn't. I couldn't just go to him and be like, hey, you're doing this wrong and this is what you should be doing and blah blah blah blah blah. You would have sent him straight to the curb. I would have triggered his fight or flight, right?

CEO would have been completely fired. There's no more CEO and then it would've been a disaster. All right.

Yeah.

So you didn't do that, I'm assuming.

I didn't do that. So I was like, okay, how do I get him to learn for himself? And, and I, I drew on my own experience as a sales rep. Mm-hmm. If you go into a sales conversation and tell people how they should think, then you, you're not going to win business.

You've, you, you've lost them at that point.

Lost them. Hey, you should buy our product because it's the right thing to do and you've been doing it the wrong way.

Right.

I knew that was gonna be the wrong thing. So I knew that psychologically, they have to be able to come to their own conclusions. They have to have ownership in their own solutions.

Right.

So, okay, how do I create an atmosphere where that could be the case? I was like, okay, so we do these monthly trainings, they're rolling topics. I'm gonna go to this rep and I'm gonna appeal to their ego and say, hey, look, I know you have a lot of experience. I know you've been in the industry a long time. You know what you're doing. I would love if you could come co-teach with me on this specific topic at one of our upcoming trainings. That's what I did. So I went to him and I asked him and I said, would you be willing? And there was like a, an excitement, a glow to him when I asked him if he would come and co-teach one of these trainings. And I said that the topic is the discovery call.

Mm-hmm.

I kept it broad enough to where it was the best practices of all the pieces of discovery and not just the piece I wanted him to come to the conclusion.

And this is important. I just want to pause here for a sec because you say, appeal to their ego. Really, all it is is in a way validation. I mean, the person did have a lot of experience and brought a lot to the table and just was missing the mark on basically maybe the important part of the whole call. But then again, who's to say it's the most important part of the call? The whole call is important, right? So, but it was important that you brought in self-recognition, validation, appreciation of the person's experience, right? As opposed to confrontational. Really, you didn't dump all the experience and knowledge of this person right out of the window. You did focus on what he did well, right? You brought him in as opposed to job reverse, right? So, you brought him in to co-facilitate with you or co-explain, co-train the team with you. And what happened?

So, we did prep sessions. It wasn't just, here's the topic. You bring yours and I'll bring mine. And You talk for 10 minutes and I'll talk for 10 minutes. I got together and I said, okay, here's how we're gonna do these types of trainings. Like, we need to like break down each piece of the discovery. We wanna spend this much time on this, this much time on this, this much time on this. We wanna bring data. We wanna bring real examples of what great looks like.

Right.

And we wanna show the success of that, you know, specific piece. And so we, we found recordings.

Right.

We talked about the process of what it looks like. I brought in like the human psychology. What is a person thinking and feeling when I'm doing this piece of discovery? Let's make sure that we're empathetic, that we're not just bulldozing through conversations. Is that okay? So here's the framework. Here's what I'd like to do. We can each kind of tag team each like section of the training. And so specifically that last piece that He was not performing on, he was going to co-teach and he was going to help me select recordings from other reps within the organization that eventually led to closed won revenue.

Right. And I really want you to bring us to the thing because we really have 2 minutes left. I really want you to bring us to that point where he realized what happened.

Yeah.

If you don't mind. And And, you know, basically what he told— what he's— what he told you.

So we did the training and a few weeks later I'm looking at the data and sure enough, that metric starts to improve for him. And I give him a shout out in front of the, like, in front of the team, like, hey, check this out. This is really awesome. Here's a recording of like what looks good. He then came back to me and literally was like, I see what you did there. And I was like, what do you mean? And he's all, you had me come and teach with you on this topic because I wasn't doing it the same way everybody else was doing it and they were outperforming me. And now I'm doing it and now I'm seeing better success. And then I had him as a friend and a champion from then on out.

That's amazing. So you brought him in, you really got his buy-in. And he realized, you know, he came to you with the realization as opposed to you telling him what to do, right? Or what to think. I want to wrap this up. I did want to ask you rapid-fire bold truth questions. And I don't know if we'll have time.

Okay.

But we're gonna try. We're gonna try. You have about 30 seconds. But before we do, I would like to thank you for joining us today. Always remind you to subscribe to our podcast and the newsletter. Follow me on LinkedIn and social media. You see a little code there you can scan. Sam, it was a great pleasure. I'm gonna go with a 30-second answer. One metric you tattoo on every dashboard when it comes to sales.

Oh goodness. Sourcing success percentage.

Okay.

If I give 100 accounts to this rep and 100 accounts to this rep, and I look at the end of the quarter, how many they could get into, meaning they could have meetings with from zero contact to meeting completed and moving into like a stage 2 of pipeline.

Right.

I then say, okay, well, this rep is just more effective. They know what they're doing. They can get in cold and they can make Thank you. I'm, I'm going to give that rep more accounts the next time I have an opportunity to give accounts.

Sam, we ran out of time. Thank you so much for joining me.