Practice Beats Training, Every Time

And I'm a smiling, happy person, but I am frustrated. I am frustrated. I am angry. I'm upset at the fact that everyone on this call that's here, that's come to your conference, the, the thousand people that constantly come to your events, I'm frustrated because they continue to waste money. And waste their time and waste their people's time by putting them through programs that have been proven to not work, through systems of training and development that have been proven to not work, but yet we continue to use those same exact methods to train people today, knowing— by the way, the same training and education that we complain about for our kids, that we may have complained about for ourselves We implement completely in every single organization on this planet and it doesn't work and we've known it for decades. That's the frustrating. It's frustrating because knowing you're wasting energy, wasting time, wasting money. And even if something came along that was far more effective, my frustration is that I fear people, you listening right now, I fear that you would just go back to the thing you know. Rather than the thing that works. I start with Theodore Roosevelt because besides the fact that he changed a country, he influenced the entire world. In his history, he started a group called the Rough Riders. Highly recommend everyone looking into that. And it was the best of the best of people to help move a nation, to help move large groups of people's thinking. And so in their application, they had, as you can see, an overwhelming amount of applicants. But there's something very specific that they were looking for that they would not accept if you didn't possess this: vigor and capacity. Energy and capability. Capability is the most important asset that we humans have on this planet today, right now. Your vigor, your grit, your energy in applying something is the most valuable assets humans have. We no longer can hang our hat on the knowledge, on what we know. We have to focus on what we can do with what we know. But all of the current programs that exist today, all of them are basically you paying your employees to forget what you taught them. That's why I'm frustrated. That's why I'm angry at this because this has been over a decade, several decades of it not working, several decades of organizations saying that 20% of my team does 80% of the work or something along those lines. Now you hear a lot of 90/10s, 10% do 90%. Why do you think that is? We have all of this learning and development. Learning and development is like coaches sending their players to a library to improve their performance on the field. Learning and development is about knowledge And knowledge is simply saying you understand. Performance is proving you understand. We are not looking for you to say you understand. You are not looking for your team to say they understand. You're looking to see how they apply what they say they understand. But currently, the only method of training and development is a library. No matter how you make it look— workshops, keynotes, online tests, video watching— those are all library activities. Those are all knowledge memory gathering. Put it in your backpack. Hopefully you'll remember how to use it. But the truth is, the forgetting curve says You won't remember how to use it. In 6 days, 75% of what you heard goes away, and in less than a month, 95% of what you heard goes away. So you end up with a team that after training is completely confused. And what do you do when you go back to— when you're confused, what do you go back to? Go back to what you've always done, what you know. That's my concern and my fear with all of you here is that no matter if there is a better system, you'll go back to what you know rather than what works. So let me ask you a question before I introduce somebody very special. And Gerhard, I don't know if you want to maybe introduce him because you and I talked about yesterday, maybe you doing the introduction. However, before I introduce him, before we introduce him, I want you to answer this question for yourself. If you were going into heart surgery tomorrow, would you want a doctor who read a book about it Which is exactly how every single person in your organization is getting trained today. Oh wait, Alex, no, we do workshops, we have them listen to someone talk for a long time, we have them do— watch videos. It's the same thing. Would you rather have a doctor who read a book about it or one who's practiced the procedure thousands of times in a simulator? Now Gerhard is about to introduce you to someone who is going to share with you, uh, specifically for sales leaders what this mastery style training versus memory style training is doing for him and his sales leaders that he works with and his sales organizations that he works with. And so, Gerhard, if you want to do your wonderful introduction.

Well, our speaker is going to be none other than Tom Searcy, and, uh, he's a legendary dealmaker and the founder of hunt big sales. And before turning 40, he led 4 separate companies from under $10 million to over $100 million in revenue. I wish I could say that about myself. That, that is outstanding. And today, his systems have helped clients generate over $21 billion in new business. Uh, with 190 of the Fortune 500 companies, including Apple, Disney, and 3M. So he is also ranked as the top 1% of Vistage speakers worldwide, and he is the author of a wonderful book called Whale Hunting and a book called How to Close a Deal Like Warren Buffett. Please welcome Tom Siasy.

Hey, Hart, thank you so much. Uh, it's always a pleasure to see you. And Alex, thank you for inviting me as well, uh, to today's conference. Um, I want to talk for just a moment. Uh, Alex is, uh, irritated. I'm energized. Uh, and I'm energized because what I'm seeing out, uh, in the marketplace, what I'm seeing with salespeople, sales leaders, as they're effective in doing what they're doing is that there is an alternative. I've trained thousands of salespeople, truly, and I've worked with hundreds and hundreds of vice presidents, directors, CROs, etc., etc., on how to run selling, how to develop skill sets, how to build out role plays and be more effective in the documents they send out. And the fact is, is that it's, as Alex said, there's the forgetting curve and you can't deny it. You will learn much, much more than you'll ever be able to retain. Inside of this platform, inside of myfuel.io, what you're able to do is store up all of the information provided by the best experts in sales that are now and have been in the past. And then from that, you are able to use them as your, your own faculty. Faculty that you're asking intimate, specific questions to. Faculty that you're having look at your drafts before you submit them to be considered. You're having faculty who are engaging on very specific topics. So if every paper you ever went out with, and every client in this case, that you were ever going to approach. You started off with the introduction, and you said, I'm thinking about this introduction. And your faculty was able to say, not a bad idea, let me make some recommendations. And then you were going to say, all right, I'm gonna write, after this introduction, I'm gonna write these 12 chapters. And I wanna really have this, you know, think, feel, do, Impact. This is what I put together. Evaluate that against best ideas and then tell me how else I can frame it. And then as I've done that, I'm putting together my proposal. And I said, this is the proposal that I'm looking at doing. And once again, best faculty comes out with the best proposal and comes out with the— this wonderful answer for you to push forward. Then it stores all of the best of what you've done. And it says, I am a new member of your faculty. You are now a member of your own faculty. And so the best of what you do, AI gives you the opportunity for a learning system, but more importantly, an interactive system. Now, this is the part that switches over to the full activity. So that's everything that you are sending and communicating and evaluating is being done at best-in-class standard. Now, we don't sell by emails or texts as much anymore. In the end, we have to have in our conversations, in our discussions, a level of mastery. I have talked to CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. I have worked with companies that are over $1 million in size. And regardless of the size of the company, You have to figure out a way to open up the conversation, begin with the questions, see if you're interpreting the information that's coming back. And what's happening with this tool is you're able to role-play this out with this amazing faculty and say, I'm going to go see XYZ company. I'll be speaking with the senior vice president of, let's say, operations. And my company is providing specific engineering and design solutions. This is our first discovery meeting, and I'd like to have us do a role play where you play the senior vice president, I'll play myself. You ask me questions, I'll respond. Score me 1 to 10 on my responses. And give me recommendations. Okay, you just got the best quality role-play experience. And here's the thing about it, you don't have to call your boss, you don't have to set a special appointment time, you don't have to work it into a calendar, you don't have to look at the, you know, the Friday at the end of the day before Labor Day weekend. You can at any time on demand have that role-play the way you want it. To talk about what you want to talk about and then be scored about it according to the best of the best around what you're saying. And then you can go back and do it again. Now you can type this in if you choose to. You can say, well, I want to do all the rest of these things, or you can just speak it into the microphone that's available and it will read back to you, uh, the answer as if you are having an active and direct dialogue. So you can simply say, I don't want you to score and I want to run a dialogue. And then you say, stop and score. So you've gone through, say, 10 minutes or 15 minutes of a discovery meeting and you say, okay, let's now debrief that. Tell me what I did well. Tell me what I didn't do well and how I could have done it better. Of all the people that are out there, when I talk to sales Leaders, CEOs, owners of businesses, and etc., they are very frustrated by the fact that they are not able to spend more time with their salespeople doing that kind of level of development. It's, it's, in the old days, you'd get in your car, the owner of the company or the CEO or whoever else was in the car with you, you'd have a bag of slides between the airport and the prospect. You're trying to figure out who's going to do what slides. You show up and that's the role play that you had. Now, there may be a number of people that are on this call that don't remember that that was the style of preparation. This is the now premium gold standard of preparation that you cannot get, and you can have as much of it as you want. The meter, It doesn't stop. Run every single new account, every single new meeting, every email, agenda, document through here, and you'll get the best outcome. So, that's why I'm excited and energized, even though Alex is frustrated because he wants everybody to have the same opportunity to do that.

100%. And I would love for you to share with everyone here, Tom, because every single person on this call is a sales leader or in sales or running an organization that has large sales teams or has goals to grow their sales. That's the only reason they come to these events that Gerhard and the Selling Power Team puts on is they want to reach new levels. And so, can you share what's happened with, you know, not that you don't have to give us all the details of every customer that's gone through this program, But what's happened to maybe a few customers that have gone through the program with you over the last 6 months and what's happened to their additional revenue that they've recognized?

All right. Well, I'll just give you a quick case study. I mean, there's been a lot of people. We 5x or 10x the size of an average deal. So, if someone is hitting opportunities of, say, $100,000 is kind of their average sale, we help them go through a system that gets them to $500,000 to $1 million and so on. You can skate that up. Because it's a different process than selling to smaller deals. One of the clients that we're working with, and it's the best example I have just in the last 6 months. So, she was the president or is the president of a company that does a specific kind of delivery into insurance companies. And it's business services and practices and etc. And she started off at the very beginning. We did the training at the very beginning. Okay, I'm going to try this on this next deal. And we said, how big is this next sale? And her answer is, I think it's going to be about $1.5 million, but I'm putting it together. So, she goes into the MyFuel, but inside of mine, which is the Tom Circe side. And so, she does our practice. Step number 1, build me up, interview me to create a profile for this insurance company I'm going to be meeting with. And so, it interviews her and she builds out a full profile. And says, interview me and build a profile of XYZ. In their case, it was an operations chief operating officer. And so now she could have looked it all up. She could have typed it all in. She could have done the rest of it. But instead, she just turned on the microphone and said, build me a profile. So now she has a profile of the company she's selling to, profile of the person they're talking to, and then says, interview me and build a profile of the problem that they need to have solved. I say, okay, great. All of that is put together. She says, okay, fine. I have an upcoming first meeting, discovery meeting. Please create an agenda. And it creates the agenda. And she says, okay, great. Create a document that's an agenda I can send to them because the first agenda was both sides, what we're going to say, what they're going to say, and send the agenda. So that document gets created. He says, okay, great. We're going to go to that particular meeting and inside of this particular agenda, walk me through the best-case answers and how to respond to them and worst-case answers and how to respond to them from these particular people in this meeting. And it was really the Chief Operating Officer. Goes and pre-role plays. Says, okay, I'd like to role play Worst answers. Goes through that, does a full role play. Now, she's building a full profile at that particular point. I can take you back through the secondary meeting. I can take you to the point of presentation. I can take you to the point of proposal. And every one of those was run through myFuel in a very dynamic but individual deal size. And she wound up landing a $10 million deal.

Wow.

Thought she was going in for $1.5 million, went through each of the steps along the way, and wound up landing that particular deal really from cold, really from just a friendly intro, and wound up with that. And the system follows— I mean, we have a particular system and all of our background and information, but the tool allows the user to then use that tool. I call it— I really shouldn't, but create your own adventure, right? And in this case, maybe you don't need the help with the agenda, or maybe you don't need help with the particular presentation or whatever it is, but you're going to need help on the role-play activities and what will be the biggest questions that are going to come back and what's the best way to answer them. It's dynamic. It's for you. And every deal is a new way to do that. So, that was That was an opportunity for her. We had 3 different people inside of a different company, but they were of that company. And they ran— it was almost like ABC testing where— and their sales manager had given them a bonus prize. Whoever uses this system and lands a deal fastest gets a particular prize. And so, But, yeah, it's the classic math. You have to show your work.

Yeah.

So, they go through LifeFuel. Each of them winds up landing a deal using this model. Now, here's the thing that's important. They didn't go sequentially. All right? What they did was they looked at whatever the overall sales process was and each of them was at a different level, is already into a sale. So, some of them had already had a discovery meeting. Some people were already at a proposal stage. Some of them were just at the final closing the deal. So, they could either role-play things out, which we recommend, or they could get documents drafted, which we recommend. And all of that is the real utility.

Yeah.

They can go away for 2 months, come back, turn on their piece, on their particular account, And all of that information is still there. Themselves and all of the smart things that they learned and did are still in their own library of experience. So, they haven't lost their best practices. They still have their great faculty. And maybe everybody else is best at this, but I'm going to tell you, most of the clients that we work with, they just stink at getting their best documents held. Like, you know, it's like the companies come back and they create the same presentation Different people do. If you go back into their databases and inside of their files and all the rest of it, there's 91 first meeting presentations because there was never a way in which you could create best in class. Well, this does that sorting for best outcome. So, again, that's why I'm excited about it.

Thank you for that.

Well, I'm so glad that, Tom, that you are positive and help Alex with the frustration. But Alex, my hat's off to you. You have transformed the company and created a performance enhancement machine that should be shut down by the end of the Food and Drug Administration because you're predicting— you're creating an addictive substance.

That's right. A positively addictive substance. Yes, a positively addictive substance. Gerhard, how much more time do we have to get into some of the science here?

We have been 5 minutes in overtime already. So—

Oh my. We need 2 minutes of overtime.

Right.

All right. Well, before we go to— have to close up shop, I think there are some links for Tom inside the chat. Please, if you run an organization that sells anything over $100,000, you need to reach out to Tom. I mean, it's just an incredible— he's incredible. What he's built is incredible. There's also a link. We didn't get to do this. We didn't get to get into the science of it today, but there should also be a link with my calendar in there.

Yes.

So, here's what I'm going to say for the people that are here and still listening. I'm looking for those 5 leaders who are tired of sending their people to a library to improve their performance and would rather send them into a gym, okay, and actually watch performance accelerate. The first 5 that click there are going to be invited with a few of their team members into what's called a Mastery Lab. It is a single session that shows you how a skill can improve in one session instead of all the things other trainers and coaches and your own team promises you. Give me a week, give me a month, give me 6 months, they'll transform. It's all nonsense. You can transform after one session. You can see improvement after just one session. And so— That link is for the first 5 to get there. They're gonna get this Mastery Lab at, at no cost, which is typically thousands of dollars. Uh, the rest of you we'll connect with, uh, you know, afterwards, and we'll see what else we can do for you. However, I'm looking for those 5 that are just tired of it. That's all. They're tired of it and wanna see some change.

We dropped the link and, uh, Emery Schweighofer said, Tom has presented to our group, learned a lot. So you have a lot of fans out there.

Thank you. Thanks so much. Thanks so much, Tom, for being on.

And make sure you go check out the sponsor booth as well.

If you're—

maybe you're not one of the 5, maybe you are, still check them out anyways.

And, uh, Tom, I think you should speak at, um, Bryant University. You will be a hit with the Stephanie students.

I'd love to do that.

Come on over.

All right, we'll figure out how to get that done. Thank you.

All right, visit our sponsor booth and click on the links, uh, In the chat. Thanks, Alex. Thank you.

Thanks, everyone.

Thanks, everybody.