Sales Transformation by Self Transformation

All right. Well, the first thing I want to say to everybody besides thank you, I mean, thank you for investing in yourself. Thank you for, you know, as I understand, being a sales leader, leading sales teams is one of the greatest joys in the world. It can also be one of the greatest frustrations in the world. And I think most sales leaders get it wrong when they try to motivate people. The better move is to transform people. And when we go through a transformation process, anything is possible. And I think if I could see a show of hands from everybody and you could just virtually raise them, would you like your salespeople to be more productive? Would you like them to generate more sales activity in less time with less stress? Would you like them to make more money for your company? Would you like them to make more money for themselves? Would you like them to be happier and more joyful or sad and frustrated? And those are all decisions sales leaders get to make. So, I'm going to take you on a little 30-minute journey. The journey includes my story as a salesperson, and I'm going to talk about 3 things today that are the seeds that allowed my transformation at the age of 24. The first seed is the seed of belief. The second seed is the seed of identity. The third seed is the seed of habit. So, as we unpack those, I want you to know that I graduated from college in 1980. I had no idea what I wanted to do for a living. I had a degree in business and finance and marketing, and so I had a chance to get into the real estate business. And because of influence, like I got from Gerhard and some of my early mentors, Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy and Daniel Kennedy and Glenda Salisbury, something happened in that first year, and I believe I experienced the first transformation. And what I want you all to understand before we get into this is that Most sales training teaches you what to say or teaches you what to do. The best sales training teaches you who to become. And so as we dig into this, I want you to think about you and I want you to think about yourself as a sales leader. I'd like your sales team to think about themselves as we go through this. And by the way, while I'm going to hit on about 9 slides, we have a playbook for you that's got 16 of these slides, all strategic depth that you'll be able to grab and chat and get as an after thank you gift from myself. And what I learned early on is it didn't matter really what you said initially. It was how people felt about you initially. And so the real shift isn't in your script or your strategy. It's really in you. And when we look at most training, people ask me, how is your sales training different than all the training out there? And I said, my training is not training. My training is development and transformation. And even though my initials TMD stand for Training, Motivation, and Development, I really believe that the motivation piece is before the training piece. And I believe that most sales leaders don't really know what motivates their sales teams. So most training teaches you what to say. And from my perspective, I'm different because we teach you who to become, what you want to become. And there's adversity in that, and there's reinvention and innovation in that, there's impact in that. And the truth is that if we transform on the inside, we will transform our results on the outside. And so, we start here with the idea that we need a better belief system. Interestingly enough, I love this connection, and this is another thing that makes what we do different. You'll notice at the top it says belief transformation, what you believe. And you'll notice that B and E are capped. We teach people what to be first, right? So if you look at scarcity and selling and convincing as kind of the left side of this graph, and you look at the right side, which is abundance, serving, and guiding, the principles of belief are far, far, far different than the principles of selling. Belief starts with you. B-E, BE. And I can say, if I could look at all of you in the face right now, I would say be first, do second. And if you really take this to heart right now and you look at B-E, be extraordinary, you know, be the best version of yourself, be empathic, you know, be somebody who listens and connects, be efficient, do things better, Faster, you know, be energetic, share passion and joy and happiness with the people that are your clients and ultimately your relationships. If you can start to really take a look at believe, you can really start to take a look at be, and then you can really start to look at me on the inside versus who I am on the outside. And so when we talk about this idea, your limits begin where your belief ends. And I really believe this. As a 23-year-old college graduate, I was getting slaughtered. I had so much call reluctance. I went to the beach one day and I started crying and I'm figuring, did I take the right job? And I was just getting hammered. I'd love to see if anybody's ever felt that. And I would drive by offices that I was supposed to serve in the real estate business. And I would just keep driving by because I didn't have the belief that I could do well. I didn't have the belief that I could move from a mindset of, of just getting sales to building relationships. I had no idea on how to get somebody engaged with me immediately through different questions and, and different things that oozed out of me because I was working on the inside me. And it took about 6 or 7 months and I started realizing that my belief or lack thereof, was the blockage in everything. Everything I wasn't getting that I wanted was because I didn't believe that I could get it. Now, here's where the sales leader role comes into play. Your job, far more important than anything else, is to have your people believe that their best self is always under construction. And to take them from being a novice salesperson to being a top-producing salesperson doesn't require a lot of stuff. And in fact, I would say almost everything you try to add won't work unless we work on the inside first. The inside is the foundation. It's like an iceberg. You know, 10% of the iceberg is what people do and when they sell and time blocking the day and all that kind of stuff. But there's 90% of that iceberg that gives the strength to the little piece that comes out the top of the water. And it's like that in selling. If we can really work on the inside purpose and values and vision and mission, and then we can plan our day, we're much more effective. And you're going to see how this begins working. So what was my belief transformation? My belief transformation early on, and We all have different ones, but I'm just going to share my story with you. I was able to retire from my first business out of college in 11 and a half years with millions of dollars. And it was because I got transformed. And the transformation was I made a choice between whether I wanted to be a selling person in business or in business as a selling person, sales professional in business, doing sales, or did I want to run a business and sales were necessary for my cash flow? The second transformation was I decided that the fastest way to grow my business, in which we had to sell mortgage loans, was to choose relationships versus transactions. I started to have a belief system that transformed everything, that I could actually get more business from fewer clients. And all of this got tied to identity. And so when those limits started to shed away, and when you can imagine I got my first relationship instead of my next deal, I started realizing that with that one relationship, there were almost as many transactions to do as I was doing for another 10 or 15 people at any one time. And so this micro action right here says, identify one limiting belief you've been carrying. You know, what is it that is a limiting belief? How long has it been a limiting belief? How important is that time in which you've allowed that to be a limiting belief and you have not flourished through transformation as your best version of you as a sales professional? And when you start to understand that you matter more than anything else, your product doesn't matter. I mean, it's got to be good. Your price doesn't matter. It's got to be competitive. Okay? Your service doesn't matter. It's got to be beyond the best, but it doesn't get you just the business. The business is gotten by you having trust in yourself. Okay? Now, trust in yourself is where fuel comes into play from an equipping standpoint. We'll get there in just a moment. But when we start to look at belief, belief starts to unlock identity. Okay? So remember, we are going to be to do, and we are not going to do to be. You can't do to be. You can't become something just by taking action. The action you take has to be tied to your deep transformational beliefs. Beliefs like Ken Blanchard talked about to me one day on a plane. He said, you know, there's only two things that are really important to to relationships. Okay. And I said, what are they, Ken? And he said, one, okay, one is form. The other is ease. And I go, what's the difference? And he goes, well, when you look at essence, which he defined as ease, if two people have essence in each other, in other words, they are attracted to each other. They believe in relationship with each other. They want to spin up businesses together. And you have that and they want to do it professionally and they want to do it efficiently and they want to do it in a way that is economically fast from a velocity standpoint. When you have people that share those values, then the stuff, the form usually doesn't get in the way. But if I'm a transaction salesperson and I want a relationship with a relationship salesperson, that's probably not going to work out because that thought doesn't hit my head. But if I'm a relationship salesperson and I get referred to a transactional salesperson, that might be the very thing that I lay down and say, you know, I don't do business with people that way. The biggest thing we see in identity management is your identity is tied to your outside world instead of your inside fulfillment. And so your inside fulfillment is something that requires boundaries. If somebody has integrity, and somebody doesn't have integrity and they try and do business together, that's not going to work. If somebody believes in getting as much done in as little time as possible, that is never going to work in relationship with somebody who loves to work 14 hours a day and just drag things out and, and not get any more done through the extra time and the extra effort. And so when I began to think about my life, and I'm even doing this today, 40 years after, you graduating from college. I'm even doing this today. I'm looking at— there is truth that my identity, if it's about relationships, forms this belief system that supports my identity where there are enough people who will do business the way that I want to do business that I don't have to worry about anybody that doesn't. And I, man, I just Life got so easy when I started getting more business from fewer people. And what that required was an identity transformation. Identity is the expression of belief. I stopped focusing on the transaction and measuring the close. You know, I became a trusted advisor and focused on the relationship, which was measured by impact. And then I became pressured purpose-driven, which is pressure replaced by purpose. When my purpose became nothing about me, when my purpose became I want to make a difference in the lives of consumers chasing the American dream and being afraid of whether or not they'll ever get it. I wanted to give them ease. I wanted to give them peace. I wanted to give them security. I wanted to give them safety. These are all emotions that had nothing to do with the product we would end up with, the cost of that product, or the price of that product. It came up that my identity was an identity of impact and transformation. So, when I awakened every day and I looked in the mirror, I didn't see somebody who had to go out and hit quota. I saw somebody who had to go add value to relationships that there was zero stress in that, zero call reluctance. If anything, I had huge levels of call excitement. And so, when we think about the identity coming between the belief and the habit, We can understand that you cannot transfer belief you don't possess. And so when we think about the summit that we're all in today, and we're thinking about where does high trust in selling really emanate from? It emanates with trust in self. Trust in self has some really important underpinnings. Competence is one. Confidence is one. Consistency is one. Collaboration is one. Converting is one. These are all beliefs from your identity standpoint that get unlocked when you start to realize that on the inside, I am becoming my best version of myself. And therefore, then on the outside, I am going to be a high-trust human relationship supported by AI and practice. And knowledge and all those things. And my identity goes from fear to faith. It goes from call reluctance to call excitement. It goes from, you know, chasing deals to repeat business and tons of referrals. I would ask every sales leader to measure what would happen to your bottom line if 50% of your business next year was 100% referral from clients that already love, know, and trust you. I would begin to look at my identity. If my identity is really based on the belief that relationships can produce more business in less time with less stress and with less effort, and I see that in pricing, I see that in turn times, I see that in operational effectiveness and efficiency and excellent and all of those things, then all of a sudden I have an entirely, entirely different vision of myself when I look in the mirror. I am not here to sell you anything. I'm here to transform your business and professional life through the services and advice and products that we offer. That's what gets me up. So when we think about this and we think about, you know, Steph Curry said something very interesting. He said, I don't practice so that I can make the shot. I practice so that I don't miss the shot. And you can see him in action over here on the right. So when we look at identity, you don't get what you want, you get who you are. And you can see over here on the right, presence and certainty and character. Your energy matters before your words do. Clients buy your conviction first. Who you are is what they remember. And so when we look at identity, we look at how do you show up? What's the first call look like? What does the first meeting look like? What is the fear that you're replacing? What is the problem that you are solving? And if your identity becomes rooted in the belief of relationship value, everything gets easier. In fact, the better you get at relationship management and retention, the more referrals you will get and the easier business will become for you. And so one of my transformations was how do I move from call reluctance to call excitement? Well, it wasn't about getting, it was about giving. And if I could bring you a buyer that might buy real estate, or I could bring you a seller that might sell real estate and I could bring you a commission, would you give me all your loans? And it was that value exchange that Robert Cialdini talks about in his book Influence. And it's that value exchange that Gary Vaynerchuk talks about in Jab, Jab, Jab, Hook. You know, it's value first and then it's business. And yet how we show up the first time, okay, that is the first sale that we make. And how you show up in that room with confidence, not cockiness, assurance, and the ability to know that you're certain about how to lead somebody through a conversation. You don't have better scripts. You just have a different heart and your identity draws people to you. And so, as we look at belief unlocking identity, here's a micro action. What one step must I take so that I can become a different, more developed, more whole person to earn the results I want? And what I want to tell you as we go into this last point is, from my perspective, I never had a year, no matter how bad the economy was, where my business went down. For 12 years, it kept going up and it went up exponentially no matter what was happening externally. And one of my transformations was the market doesn't matter. The market never matters. What matters is what I do in the market I'm in. And so my identity became an identity of positivity in challenging times. And so what I want you to do is with this micro action, Who must I become? Who, how about this one? This might even be a Cathcart question. How would the person I see myself being in the future be handling today? That's an identity question and it's a very powerful question. So what you do leads then to habit transformation. And so this third thing is success becomes very simple if we understand this as sales leaders. Is have my sales teams do the fewest things possible in the order of which one thing produces the greatest sales growth and revenue and learn to create an environment where outside of the top 2 or 3 things for my sales team, almost nothing else matters. Reports don't matter. Data doesn't matter. You know, all this kind of stuff. I mean, we have to get to a point where we understand that the best habits for any sales organization to have are help your sales teams make more money and they'll never go anywhere. And if you help your sales teams make more money, they will attract more sales prospects to your business. And if you have more referrals coming in for people on your sales team instead of hard marketing costs and recruiting firms and things like that, the negotiation process and the speed to saying yes to work for you, all that stuff becomes a gift to you because you're working on helping your teams win in the marketplace. In fact, one of the great leadership questions to your teams is, how can I help you win today? And you know what? It's interesting. About 87% of sales leaders say they don't know how a person on their sales team defines winning. Is it more money? Is it more time freedom? Is it a better relationship with their branch manager? Whatever it might be. Right. And so we look at habit transformation. So it's, What are you becoming? B, B, belief. Then it is, how does that belief emanate through your identity? And once that's defined, how does your identity determine what you do every single day? So, habits are identity in action as your slide shows you. So, here's what we know about top producers. They practice more than they perform. And it's like any great, great sports franchise. Top producers rehearse relentlessly before they ever step in front of a client. Excellence is earned in private before it's displayed in public. Fuel is a practice platform based on it being a knowledge platform. And we're not interested in how many videos you watch. It's all microlearning. It's all very short, 3-minute, 4-minute lessons, maybe a 7-lesson course. But there's thousands of lessons to transform sales productivity and leadership productivity and all of that. But what we know is this, and this is going to blow your mind as sales leaders. And if it blows your mind like I want it to blow your mind, I want to put my hand up to help you. I want to put my hand up to be your solution. Here's what I want to share with you. Think about, let's just think about an NFL football team. Then let's think about the top 10% of your sales team. And then let's think about the rest of your sales team. Okay. So if you're in the NFL, you're practicing on average 40 to 55 hours a week for a 1-hour game. Now that practice-to-play ratio is 50 or 100 to 1, depending on how many minutes the defense is on the field or how many minutes the offense is on the field. Okay. So a 50 to 100 to 1 practice-to-play ratio. The stats tell us that the top 10% of salespeople spend 1 to 2 hours for every 1 hour of sales activity practicing and preparing. The relationship between the NFL and the top 10% of sales teams is that if the NFL practiced only as much as your top 10% of salespeople, they would be out of the league in under 3 weeks. And I have 7 different sources of stats on this. It's crazy. Now you look at the rest of your sales teams and the practice-to-play ratio is even negative. But most of the reports say that it is about 10 minutes for every sales activity. Now, here's what we know. If you practice more than you play, when you play, you will look like you haven't practiced. We had one gentleman last week that did 31 minutes of role-playing with me in my AI agent on our Fuel platform. and in those half hour or so scripting, role-playing, doing all the things that you can do. And it's, it's literally that beautiful of a proprietary system. I have 700,000 hours of learning in my AI container, so I can solve anything for anyone without having to physically be there. He made $11,000 in 2 sales calls after spending half an hour with me role-playing. So if you want your sales teams to be better at the habit transformation, remember I said earlier, confidence only comes from competence. If I don't know what I'm going to do, I'm either going to be forced to do it and fail. And there's nothing wrong with failure as long as I change strategy. Failure is demonstrating the wrong way being the right way to help me find a better way. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's, everything's wrong with it if we don't improve strategy and skill. Okay. And so we look at that and we start to think, what would happen if the competence and confidence levels went up 25% in the next 90 days for my entire sales team globally? What would happen to productivity? Right? And here's what happens when belief and identity and habits come together. Discipline creates consistency. Discipline is not a negative word. And in relationship selling, disciple is disciple because as As you know, you see all these examples and we can go back in history with Jesus and his 12 disciples. We can understand that discipleship is relationship and relationship selling requires you to be a disciple and to disciple people, give them value, give them honor, help them win, give them the right pathway to follow and all that. Right? And we also know that salespeople waste more time not selling than they actually do selling. Why? Because of everything we've talked about. And then here's the deal. Consistency builds more trust. Trust is what leads to retention and conversion. So, when we show up the same way every single day, trust actually compounds. So, these 3 things are your marching orders. And I want you to just take a look at what would happen if every single day your team was role-playing at a very, very, very inexpensive interchange, right? I mean, what would it be like if they could without you having to help them learn things that would help them rehearse objections and practice appointment setting scripts and handle customer breakdowns and, you know, just be more certain in the marketplace. And then what would happen if we could teach them how top performers actually batch and block their time so that they can do the most important things in the least amount of time that produce the greatest amount of revenues? You know, what are the, the, the learnings that need to happen today? Do I start off every day with a a sacred morning routine? Do I midday revamp my mind to keep it on the right track? Do I keep going with skill development and belief development? You know, my dad told me as a doctor that if he had stopped learning how to be the doctor specialty he was after graduation, he would have lasted about 3 years. He had to keep learning and learning and growing and getting better. And that just leads us to this thought that every day the most productive organizations in the world embrace non-negotiables. And non-negotiables in selling are selling. And what we have to understand is that if people don't know how to do selling at level 10, level 10 confidence, then there is zero way, zero way they're going to be one of the poster childs for your brand and for your leadership. And so, what are they? And this is your third micro choice. What are the 3 non-negotiables? Here were mine. Morning mindset sacred, no matter what day of the week. Morning mindset sacred. How I start the day is how the day goes. If I have an upset, then I do a reset at lunch. If I have anything goes wrong in the morning, I do a reset because I realize there's still a lot of hours to sell. And what I then did is I talked to my borrowers that had financing going to make sure they were doing great. And then I talked to my referral relationships, make sure they were going great. Outside of that, that was the only thing I did to make money. So here's the racetrack. Netflix of personal development. Go to myfuel.io. You can, you can, for pennies, $25 a month, you can have 1,000 minutes of AI coaching and access to 1,500 courses to help your sales team win. If you go through here and you want to click demo, we will call you immediately and we will set a demo up with you. This is the most prolific thing that I've ever developed in my life. We're in 71 countries around the world. Every one of our bots can speak 100 languages fluently. So it doesn't matter what market you're in. What matters is can we talk in the markets we're in the way we're supposed to talk? And in America, there's so many different ethnic verticals. You know, there's Asian and there's, you know, there's Russian and there's German and there's French. And there's South America, South, I mean, yeah, Venezuela and South America. And so just trust that and give your team the gift of just taking a look at fuel. And if you wanted to talk about B2B kind of relationships like an enterprise deal, that's where our sweet spot really is. And so at the end of this, we just take a look at this. This loop never stops, you guys. And I would ask you when you get the playbook, print this out, have this be your racetrack. This reminds me of my racetrack when I was reaching racing HO cars at the age of 7 and 8. Didn't understand these 4 things yet, but beliefs start everything. And as you see the arrows, that leads to identity. Identity leads to habits. Habits lead to results. And those results prove out belief. So belief goes up. First time I made $10 grand in a month, I believed I could make $10 grand in a month. First time I made $100 grand in a month, I believed I could make $100 grand in a month. First time I made $1 million a month, I believed I could make $1 million a month. And those beliefs are what opened the door. They crushed the ceiling. There's no more anything holding people back. And your salespeople show up every day. What was my last experience in the last 24 hours as a professional salesperson? Did I go to sleep happy, joyful, and fulfilled? Or did I go to sleep with anxiety, stress, fear, and worry? And if we can get people on the right track, pun intended with this slide, we're off to the races. So do me a favor and just screenshot this QR code. If you want to follow up with us, you can talk to Lauren. She's on. She's my chief application— amplification officer. She takes our brand around the world and she is your transformation concierge. She'll help you with any questions you have. And Jim and Gerhardt, thank you so much for letting me join.

And I was right. I was absolutely right. You blew us away with great content. And your personal story is so inspiring. Thank you, Todd. I appreciate that. And I've got the little golden nuggets. Keepers, confidence only comes from competence. Golden. Morning mindset is sacred. Absolutely. Absolutely. And the reset, if you have an upsetting experience, that makes so much sense. And it's all about what you are, what, how you choose to be. So God bless you.

Thank you, man. Thank you, Jim, for all the info.

My, my takeaway is, um, very simple, that, um, you want to transform to the best version of you, right? And how do we get to the best version of you is the audit of your belief system.

Right.

Because a lot of people operate on a belief system that is not self-enhancing, where people put themselves down, where their self-talk is not positive, where their goals are not clearly written down somewhere. And you said identity is the result of your beliefs, and you can transform your identity and your destiny by changing your beliefs. And it's a choice that we all make.

I have somebody that does about $100 million a year in sales. I've been coaching her for 10 years. She is an absolute rock star. And she said that the biggest thing she learned from me, and this is just a closing idea for all of you. She said, why do I always say the sky's the limit? And I go, I don't know why. And she goes, because the sky is not the limit. There is no limit. Limit. And even though we use that just, you know, as metaphorically, the sky's the limit, well, if you're Elon Musk right now, you do not believe the sky is the limit. Uh, if you're, if you're looking at our, our space journey right now, 252,000 miles, we set a record, uh, in the US in our space travel just in these last weeks. And you look at that and you go, if you believe that there was a wall, you know, somewhere this side of the moon, you wouldn't ever have even thought to go beyond the moon or anywhere else.

The limit is your own thought universe, right?

Right, right, right, right. Somebody said, what would happen— listen to this— uh, somebody said to me one time, your goal next year is to make, uh, make as much in income— let's see here, what'd he say? He said, oh, he said double your income and double your time off. And I said, that's impossible. And he goes, see, limiting belief. Well, you could double your income, you know, paying taxes what you made in income last year, this year.

Well, that's— well, there are, there are some limits we need to respect, which is time. And, uh, I'm not going to shift over to Michael.

I'm bye-bye now, right? I respect that. Thank you all for listening. Check us out at toddduncan.com or myfuel.io. Thanks, Garrett. Thanks, Jim.