Fireside Chat: Give to Grow – Transform Relationships into Revenue

We have a very special guest, Mo Bonnell. He is a wonderful human being who has written a best selling book called Gift to Grow. And when he launched the book, he had a party for 300 people. And he got a wonderful reception from everybody. And I think you send it out to at least 700 CEOs or 800 CEOs. Did I get those numbers right?

Yeah, actually the initial round of advanced reader copies, we sent a 7,000 out, so add a zero. Wow.

So I missed it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When you, when you write a book called Give to Grow, the pressure to give away is quite high. So we try. I think we broke the record for how many copies we sent out in the universe.

That's incredible. Yeah. So what, what sets you apart from all the other speakers and all the.

Other.

You know, authors is that you are a shining light in a negative world. And we live in a world, everybody knows that negativity sells. Bad news sells better than good news. That's why we don't have a good news newspaper in this country. And that avalanche of negative news leads to negative self talk. And that negative self talk leads to negative emotions. And those negative emotions lead to self defeating actions. And that is a dilemma. That is. You know, when I look at the research by nih, people experience negative self talk on an ongoing basis. We experience about 60,000 words a day and 80% of those words are negative. And in order to flourish or stay just even, we need a ratio of 3 to 1 between negative positive and negative thoughts. So if we is, you know, the question is, how do we establish that ratio by reading positive books, by listening to positive recordings, by watching positive shows, but there is not enough available. And the other thing that I am fascinated by is that when we interview high achievers, that ratio is 5.6 to 1 of positive thoughts and expectations to negative thoughts and expectations. So I'd like for you to reflect on that and share your perspective on how you can achieve that turnaround.

Yeah, well, Gerhard, it's so important. I think that research you just mentioned, the 5.6 to 1, came out of the University of Michigan, really compelling. And when we apply that to sales, this idea that we experience a massive amount of negative talk, but actually need to flip that to positive so that we can solve our clients and customers problems. The biggest person, the biggest competitor we have is ourselves. And we've got to be able to get rid of that negative talk. And if you want, Garrett, I can share the research we did around. What do people say in their head like we Literally have verbatims. We categorize them. We didn't know if there were three roadblocks or 23. We found out there's five lies that salespeople tell themselves that they've got to get out of the way so that they can succeed. We can go deep on those now if you want. We can talk at more of a high level. Where. Where do you think the audience would like to go next?

Well, you talk about lying to yourself and I know you have a whole chapter in the book and maybe you have a slide that illustrates the type of lies that salespeople are telling themselves. And I would not really characterize them as lies, but misinterpretations of their reality or their potential.

That's exactly right. We chose lies. My editor and I chose lies to be quite provocative. We could also just loosen that up a little bit, call them traps to avoid. And what we did is. It was so funny. I'll tell you the backstory. Gerhardt for everybody is like, my publisher does one book a year. He's the only person in the world with that business model, Bard Press. So the amount of time that he spent with me in writing Give2Grow was unbelievable. And at one point in the middle of writing the manuscript, he said, mo, you've trained 50, 60,000 people. Like what? What do people tell you that gets in their own way? And Garrett, we're on a Zoom call like this. And I just stared back at Todd. I'm like, I actually don't know the answer. And the reason is when you're helping people grow at scale like we do at Vinyl Idea Group, people don't email usually and say I'm stuck. They email when they had a big success. So we hear all the big successes from using our Give to grow methodology, but not as many of the traps. So what we did, back to hundreds of different sessions, I and all of our big team of facilitators and we just added a little 10 minute exercise of all of them and said, hey, think of somebody you meant to reach out to prospect when you hesitated or never reached out. Type into Zoom. Or we write on flip truck. Tell us exactly what you were thinking. It's the first of its kind research I've ever seen in this. And like I said, we didn't know if we'd get 5, 3 lies, 5, 23, whatever. It turns out there's five things that get in people's way. These are our self competition and they go in order. We found you have to, you have to topple over one lie to get to the next or get past one trap to get to the next. These are the big five. I can't do it. I don't know what to do. I might do it wrong. I'm too busy. I'm going to look bad. And it's when you actually see the verbatims where they really come to life. I just like doing the work. I don't like going to dinner. I'm not good at chitchat. I can't do it like so and so did. These are the I can't do that lies. As we go further down the road. I don't know what to do once we get past. I can't do that. Most salespeople have gotten through that, but maybe not all the I don't know what to do lie that's right behind that one is, well, I can't reach out. I don't have anything meaningful to share. I don't excuse to reach out. I need to wait till the next year because they're busy right now. At the end of this year, I might be bothering them. And as we go through these, they get deeper and deeper and deeper. Here we know what to do and we're ready to do it. We're afraid of perfectionism. We're afraid we might do it wrong. Well, I don't know what they'll ask because this is a new area or we've got a new product or a new solution. I'm afraid to talk about it with people. I'm not going to say that to my boss. But I will hesitate myself. I might not even know. This is my own barrier. It's deep in my subconscious. I might be. I'm too busy. This is a classic one. And then our last one is the fear of doing it the wrong, the fear of rejection. And then you can see all these ones here. So we. I want to kick back to you because I think you're the like the guide, the Sherpa guiding me up the mountain that'll take us to the exact right place for the audience. But the key to this, everybody, is you. The only way past these is to educate the salespeople on them because they're the only one that hears the lie. So for each of these five, there's a way to spot it and there's a way to solve for it. Gerhard, back to you.

Well, thank you. What I'm thinking is that there is also a lot of self blaming going on in that negative arena that salespeople are playing in. And blame Blocks breakthroughs.

Exactly, exactly. And I think like one of the things that we find super helpful is educating a team on exactly what the verbatims that they might hear, having them work on what their personal version of that is right now, and then educating them on the solution for each of these and having people do that right there. Live sessions. Super powerful.

Yeah. There are two things that I want to mention. One is that leave up that slide. That.

Yep. I'll pull it back.

When, when you think about it, those statements, those lies are not a hundred percent in your consciousness. They're not like billboards, they're like stage whisperers.

Yes.

We, we don't fully pay attention to. So the first step to me is awareness, to become hyper aware of what is it that you're telling yourself. So I think it would be a good idea to keep a journal and not in a chronological order, but put a timer in your iPhone and say at, you know, at 11:30 I will do a mind check and see and write down what you're thinking at that moment at 11:30 and do it again at 2:30 and do it again at maybe 7:30. And then at the end of the day you look at what your mind has created for you and your mind creates condition, success conditions or failure conditions. So the negative selftalk awareness step is number one. But the second step is you can also use positive affirmations. And you know, Tom Hopkins once said, I see, I don't see failure as failure, but as an opportunity to learn and to grow. So by reframing the negative talk into more constructive.

Language, then your emotions got to be different, you're going to feel happier and you are going to break through. Otherwise if you don't do that, you get stuck. And I would, I would recommend highly that anybody who's out there read Give to Grow because it is a, a mind opening book where you look at your mind and from a, from a perspective of the owner of a guest house. So the owner of a guest house knows that guests come in and then they leave. And thoughts are guests and you want to treat them as guests. You don't want to push them out the door, you don't want to fight them, you want to understand them and you tell them, sit down, where are you coming from? And examine the thought and don't judge the thought you have created that those are your guests. But yeah, as you listen to those thoughts, they actually evaporate, disappear, transform. And then you have the freedom when they're gone to create new thoughts, new strategies, set new Goals and make better decisions.

You nailed it. And to go, that was so good that I don't, I don't want to even repeat any of it, but I'll go a step farther down the road. And there's a great body of literature called TSC or Trait Self Control. And it finds that people that do hard things create those self affirming, those affirmations. You're talking about those positive beliefs and they tend to do more of them. So one of the things we can do as sales leaders and salespeople is to batch outreach. This is like reaching out to people that haven't replied to us or canceled the last meeting or that we met at the conference two weeks ago. That is one of the hardest things to get through. And if we can batch those, where we're reaching out to lots of people, rapid fire, right after each other, we can tend to do more of it. I've also seen another hack people can use is have salespeople do it together. Like literally join a zoom screen. Nobody talks. They just sit there and hammer out outreach. And they just put sent, sent, sent in the chat. That's all they write, or plus one or five or a number. And it builds this they're working together thing. And you just start to see the numbers. Sam sent five, Janine sent two. Oh my gosh, we're up to 52 outreaches and we're not, we're not even talking. We're just like firing these off. So a lot of these, there's so many great hacks and give to grow that te that are like that, to your point, that are little things sales and sales leaders can do that enable more positivity. And what we find is more positive actions just create more positive actions. It just plows over all these lies we're talking about.

Yeah. And you begin to flourish. The other fascinating chapter that I want to mention is the act of giving. And we are all trained in, you know, you know, I, I grew up in a different kind in Austria. But.

What I was floored by when I came to the United States is how many generous people there are that are really intentional about giving away everything, billions of dollars and, and those are the happiest people. And.

You know, Adam Grant at the University of Pennsylvania talks about the giver, the matcher and the taker. And I want you to explain those three mindsets.

Yeah, it's so interesting. I'll even put up a little visual that I know you and I have talked about a lot. And to frame it all up, it's the idea that after contracts are signed, the things we do to deliver on our promises aren't just different from the activities we do to win the next one. They're complete opposites. And to zoom into this idea of how much to give away, to your point, when we're doing work, we can actually train people not to give anything away. Like that's the, that's the move to make and they get used to that. Our solution architects, our delivery people, our experts, they can get used to not giving anything away because they're trying to manage scope. But what we've got to do is toggle to the winning of the work mode later when we're trying to win work. And we need to give away as much as it takes to, to create demand. So we actually want to just go from near zero to whatever it takes to create momentum. So the research that Gerhard everybody is referring to is brilliant stuff. Adam Grant led this and his whole teams and they basically found that there's givers, takers and matchers in the world. Givers give without any strings attached. Matchers try to tit for tat every, every conversation. I'll give this to you if you give that to me. Like it's a negotiation. Takers are trying to take all they can. Get everybody else to do their work for them. The most interesting part of the study wasn't that givers gain or that givers turn out on top. It it's that a big chunk of the givers were the very top performers in almost every domain. But this was the counterintuitive insight is a big chunk of the givers were actually last. So it actually went chunk of the givers were the most successful. Then generally speaking matchers, then generally speaking takers, and then a big chunk of the givers. And the difference between the top performers who were givers and the bottom performers, nice guys and gals finish last type of givers is two things. One is they knew how to say no. So they steered their giving to the highest opportunities, not just saying yes to every request that was made of them. Thing one, thing two, for those that they said yes to, they scaled their giving to the size of the potential win on the end. Still no strings attached. But if you've got a $10 million opportunity, it might make sense to give away $100,000 of value. If you have a $10,000 opportunity, it might make sense to Give away a 10 minute conversation. So first step, yes or no. Do I give, do I accept this request or to go find the Best opportunities, the one we create ourselves. Do we want to go out and give to prospects and proactively mention it? Thing number two is I want to scale that giving to what I expected value of what I might get. That's the winning move. Gerhard.

Well, give me some practical examples when it comes to giving gifts, because there, there's a book called Giftology.

Somebody came up with the idea that if you gift something, it, it is a mental interrupter.

It's almost like shockwaves go through that person's mind emotionally where they say, wow, I'm getting a gift. What a cool thing. And what are practical examples that sales people and sales leaders can use to either give something to the customer or give something to the salesperson?

Yeah. So I want to cover two types of gifts. Ones are physical items, which is swag, and things like that. But the more important gift to give is a gift of expertise. You're actually help solving somebody's problems. But let's talk about swag first. Giftology does a great job of doing this. And actually I have an example right here. The book basically says you don't want to give too many gifts away that just are about you. You want to give gifts away, they're about them. So I gave a speech for a nonprofit at one point and they could have easily sent me a yeti tumbler with their logo. They didn't. They sent me a yeti tumbler with my quote on it. So Gerhardt, I didn't plan this. Just it's here. But it says it's always your move and there's always a chance to be helpful. That's one of the most beloved lines. And Give to Grow. They didn't. They could have sent me a yeti tumbler with their logo. They probably had them in a closet. They went out and had this custom made, guessed which one I use every day. Not somebody else's logo, Yeti Tumblr. I use the one with my name on it and I think of them every time I do it, which is like ten times a day. Brilliant move. The second type of. So that's a physical item that requires a little bit more thought. But I'm telling you, if you send gifts like that, people remember you forever. The much, much, much, much, much more powerful gift is a gift of time and expertise. So we call that. While the book is called Give to Grow, there's a chapter on something called Give to Get. A Give to get is a little different. Give to Grow as a mindset. Give to get is a discrete up for offer of helpfulness. Think of it like a free project. So what you do here is you say, I've got a $10 million opportunity at that client. Let's say it's for outsourcing, whatever it is, what can I back up and offer at no charge? It's easy to say yes to. It's valuable for them and it will create a next step for me. Remember, I've got no momentum in this situation. We don't even know this organization. Let's say we met one time at a conference after a speech we gave. Well, if I can offer them say a half day workshop that might be look at some data analytics about how much money we might be able to save. It looked at a project plan maybe of how they could put this in process if they did it themselves, like no strings attached. I'm going to add a tremendous amount of value in this half day workshop. But I design it so that at the end of it a logical next step for them would be, hey, could I didn't. We didn't realize the business case here is much bigger than we thought. It's 10 times what we thought. Would it. Could you send us a proposal on what, what it might look like to outsource that function to you? I'm just, we're super curious. Yeah, we'd be happy to do it. A great give to get is easy to say as to and so compelling. It adds so much value. The prospect asks you for the next step. That's the type of giving that has a lot, a lot of value. I love the yeti Tumblr example, but I'd much rather focus my time on creating demand for high value opportunities. Gerhard.

Well, I'm thinking of another gift which is to.

Pay attention to the person behind the person. And I want to share a quick story. When Dr. Wayne Dyer was pitching his first book to his New York publisher, he visited with him in New York and he had like seven pages of notes on how he thought he would promote the first book. And he sensed in the conversation that the editor has had some traumatic experience.

He was not in a good mood. And he asked him, how are you doing? How. How are you really doing? And he's. He talked about his impending divorce. He was distraught. So Wayne just actively listened to the person giving the gift of attention. And the editor talked for about two and a half hours. And Wayne Dyer said very little. And at the end of that cleansing conversation, he called it like drainage counseling.

The editor said, I want to take your book.

Oh, I believe it I so believe it. One of the chapters I know that because we've talked about it, you liked a lot is the chapter on how to ask great questions, which we titled fall in love with their problem. And there's three great ways we can add value in a client conversation, a prospect conversation, customer conversations. One is obviously our technical acumen. That's what we usually prepare for. We got our PowerPoint slides or demo, whatever. But yeah, that might be the right move. Or if we read the room, maybe. Second idea is they just need somebody to listen to. That's an outside third party focusing on the relationship. One of the lines in the book people love is a great deal, might make your year a great relationship, might make your entire career. So investing that time, listening unlocked massive value for Dr. Dyer. And the third way might be strategic ideas. We're an external, we see all kinds of things. So they might want to brainstorm a little bit. Being able to read the room and ask the right questions is one of the most valuable things that, that we can provide. And it's not always our technical acumen.

So there is one more concept that I like you to elaborate on, which is the gift of trust. And you talk about the truth in a book, you talk about vulnerability. So can you explain the mechanics of trust?

I sure can. There's a lot of science behind this. And if I'll just share an image here that I think is really interesting, that people have really liked is if we focus on that idea of falling in love with the client's problems. One of the most important things we can do as we prepare for meetings is craft. Great questions. Meaning a lot of times people craft. Here's the things I want to pitch to them. I'm going to fall in love with my solutions. That destroys trust me. What tends to correlate to trust scientifically is putting the other first over us and then acting on that. So what the idea of give to grow is a mindset is fall in love with their problem, give them the experience of working with you, and always make a recommendation for the next step. That's a part of the book that has a process. Well, that falling in love with their problem is really critical. How you ask questions is paramount. So you'll see some example questions on these pages here. We've got 50 in this document. We can send it to everybody. Just come by our booth and our team's there today and tomorrow and can give this document to you. But the idea is there's some research by Diana Tamir, core level researcher and what she does is hook people up to functional MRI machines, measures blood oxygenation in the brain. And when people are asked a very specific type of questions and they answer it, trust is built. And the pleasure center of the brain is what fires. Pleasure center is ruling the roost all the time. It's what we experience when we drink a red bowl, eat great chocolate, things like that. It's like determining our short term actions all the time. And the kind of questions Dr. Tamir found light up the pleasure center and build trust are ones that elicit the personal perspective of the other person. So as you see the slide, you'll notice every one of these questions makes it clear we're asking for something only they know. Hey, from your perspective, given your seat, what was the most powerful thing in your career? That blank. Something that only they would know. Those types of questions to start. And then very critically, the other type of questions that highly build trust, tons of research behind this are follow up questions. So you want to chase the energy, you want to go in with. If it's an hour meeting, five, six, seven questions that are really well designed, like the ones I just showed, they're going to make it clear you want their personal perspective as you see their energy light up, follow up. Why do you say that? Oh, I noticed you're really passionate about that. Hey, you mentioned this. Can you tell me more about that? Rephrasing back, chasing that energy, letting them know you're really listening. And then in meetings after that you're saying, hey, two months ago we met, you said this is a priority. I just want to send you this article. It's really going to fit to that conversation we had two months ago. It's, it's in the asking of those types of questions, the follow up questions and then the follow up after meeting. That's where massive trust can be built. And what takes most, takes your competition years, you can do in months. Yeah.

And also recognizing the fact that the answer to your first question is not always complete, it's not always exhaustive and it's not always true. And you need a series of follow up questions. And that's why when a Heisenberg, the physicist and Nobel prize winner, said nate secrets, it only responds to our method of questioning.

You nailed it. That's exactly right. And these, what's really exciting about all that, I think is these are skills salespeople and sales leaders can learn. Like you can learn how to craft a great question, you can learn how to ask a follow up question, you can learn how to chase the Energy. And that is a skill that few people are taught. And we find it's one of the biggest unlocks to economic and commercial success, relationship success over time. Yeah.

And that's what Stephanie Boyer is teaching her students and she calls it conversation mastery. In order to be a master in a conversation, you also need to master learn how to master your self talk because the conversation with other people always precedes by a conversation you have with yourself. How will I approach Mo? How will I, you know, is a big customer? How do I navigate that conversation in a way that where I don't overpower, where I don't undersell, but where we co create 100%.

That's exactly right. And then that, that builds on the science you loved in the book on the IKEA effect. We buy into what we help create some science out of Harvard. And once you learn, once you fall in love with their problems, start to craft some solutions, co creating that with the prospect massively helpful.

So tell me more about the IKEA project. What, what is the philosophy behind that?

Yeah, the, the IKEA effect is first studied out of Harvard. Michael Norton and all star team of researchers started studying this validated as a mental heuristic, a mental shortcut in our minds as humans. And it basically says that we've not only buy into what we help create, we have a higher chance of saying yes to something that, that we co created. Um, but we view. But the secondary part of the research is in multiple studies we view our own work product on par or better than worldwide experts. Even if it's objectively not on par or better, it's quite worse. So we not only buy into our stuff, we love our stuff and think it's better than it is. So one of the things that salespeople do that harms themselves the most often is send a full proposal that's 100% perfect. There's no room for the client to add any value. There's. And the problem with that is it the only. We all love to add value. The only way for the prospect to add value is to tear it apart to find the things that are wrong with it. As opposed if we take a different approach and say gosh Sally, it sounds like you'd love a proposal pretty soon, why don't I just send it to you in the body of an email. We won't polish it up. That implies it's not done and it'll probably be about 80% right. Because we only had this one hour call. I know there's things that we didn't have time to catch today, but I can send that over. Female I can do it it fast because I'll just keep it in the body email. It'll literally need like 20% editing on your, your, your part. We'll have a quick call next week. And what's great about that is when we put everything in a formal approach, it's one and done and we find that'll save you a ton of time. Clients love this and, and if they, if they don't say yes to that, they were never going to read your proposal anyway. If they won't spend a little bit of time with you, and if they do love it, then you're a step farther down the road for buy in because they're going to love it because their, their fingerprints are all over it.

How can people in the audience engage with you? What's the best way?

Well, I noticed in the chat a couple of people said, hey, can you put that slide up? Can you put this slide up? There's one place you can go for the slides we showed. It's free and you can get a whole bunch more. And it's give to grow.info.info givetogrow.info and you can sign up there and there's a whole toolkit you can get in a training. You can even scale across your teams. Doesn't cost anything. And, and we designed it so you don't even have to have the book give to grow givetogrow.info. you can actually get the training for free. Because we wanted to give so much away because we wrote a book with give in the title. People can also stop by our booth. We're giving away three of our marquee trainings by a raffle. It's over $15,000 of value plus a bunch of books. So stop by the booth. We've got a team manning there. I'm going to pop over there now for a half hour or so. So I'll actually be there. We can interact. And the other thing, gearhard just for you because you're awesome. We're allowing people to buy Give to grow for $8 a book, which is less than half of what it's on Amazon for and it only lasts for a few days. If people go by the book, there's a code and we're basically for selling power 3.0. We're allowing people to buy those book direct. So Anyway, give to go.info free training. Stop by the book for the raffle. $15,000 of training we're giving away to somebody that all you have to do is sign up, takes a second, and you can get a copy of Give to Grow for a couple more days for $8 apiece, which is less than half the price on Amazon. It's only for selling power 3.0 people gear heard.

Thank you, Stephanie.

We're giving things away because we're. Because we believe in it. How about that? This is.

This is great. I mean, I don't want to keep you here because I know you got to get over to the sponsor booth and talk to everybody who I'm sure wants to talk to you. I have to say that, you know, seeing the lies and then the words that are associated with it, I don't think people even recognize that some of these things that they're saying to themselves are so negative and so highlighting that and understanding. I see it all the time with my students in class. And so it's, you know, it transcends when you're just starting out, learning and then, you know, far into your careers.

Yeah, Stephanie. And what's neat about Give to Grow is it's. It's been out three months already, a bestseller. So I'm. We're getting so much feedback all the time, and one of the most common things people say is, I didn't even know I was holding myself back until I read that section of the book. And now I know how to spot these lies and how to overcome them, and that's just a skill I've never seen taught anywhere. It's super cool.