Shari Levitin's 4 Pillars Pillars of Learning - unedited, unfiltered

Hi, my name is Gerhard Schwartner and welcome to Selling Power tv. Today we have a very special guest, Sherry Leviton. She is a keynote speaker, published author, and she has a big heart. Welcome, Sherry.

Well then let's just end right there. Okay, Gerhardt, that was good enough for me.

Tell me about your mother who is 92 and still speaking.

My mother, My mother is my inspiration. She's actually 90. She'd get very upset if you said she was 92. But you and I talked a little bit yesterday. And my mother, when she was a young girl, she was born in Berlin. She and her two sisters, her mother and her father, escaped Nazi Germany. In fact, her very first memory was going to a parade, but it wasn't a happy parade. And on the top of the hill was a man named Adolf Hitler. And so my grandmother was very courageous and they were able to get out of Germany. It was hard to get out at that time. She did what she had to do and they emigrated, got on a ship back in those days and went all the way to California. And when they got there they were very poor, of course they had to. My grandfather was a salesman, he was a successful salesman, he was a furrier. But of course when you were escaping the Holocaust, you had to leave everything. And so they didn't speak the language, they didn't have any money, they were in la. My grandmother and grandfather worked three jobs. And my mother was left home alone at six years old. And she walked down the street and made a startling discovery, was called the public library. And she realized she could pick, she could choose 10 books every single week, take them back and get 10 more for free. She couldn't believe it. And she did that. And she not only taught herself English, she ended up getting into UC Berkeley, then became a writer, published 44 books, taught writing and today she's 90 years old, she is a keynote speaker, she speaks on the Holocaust and by the way, she just wrote her ten year business plan. She has no idea how old she is. And she's just a force of nature, Gerhardt. And she's my inspiration, my everything and my best friend. So thank you for asking. I, I, I talk to her every day.

Yeah, I was curious where your energy comes from. And the energy is something that a lot of people don't know how to develop and how to nurture and how to grow. And I think your, your seeds of energy comes from your grandmother that was, you know, transformed by your mother and then again transformed by you. And you're a force of nature. Because I've seen you on stage, I've seen you get standing ovations, and your grandfather was a salesman. And when you're in sales, you know that selling is a transfer of energy.

Yeah, it's a great way to put it. You're right. And you know, a lot of people say, oh, I don't have enough time. I don't have enough time. I think as humans, we've all got the same amount of time. Sometimes we don't have enough energy. I do work really hard at it. I just turned 63 years old. I just had my birthday. And.

I think maintaining our energy is one of the most important things we can do. What we eat, what we read, what we consume, what we don't consume. I exercise every day. And then I also know my algorithms. I'm on fire in the morning. I can get more done between 5 and 8 in the morning than anyone I know. But at this time, you know, 3 o' clock in the afternoon, I feel like a spinning top and I lose my energy. And that's when we need to stop pushing ourselves and we need to restore and renew and do quieter activities. But I'm still learning. It's a. It's a never ending.

Yeah. I want to go back to the library experience of your grandmother where she took out 10 books and absorbed the energy of 10 books and then another 10 and another 10. And that is, to me, focused energy. That store that gets stored, that lasts a lifetime. Where is. Other people take that same energy and dissipate the energy by swipe, swipe, swipe, TikTok or Instagram and everything where the energy erodes and doesn't accumulate and doesn't feed you more than in the present moment.

Well, it's also shortened our attention spans, which is what I'm going to be talking about at the Selling Power event next week. I got a stat here. I have to read it because I just found it. There is so much information and stimulus coming at all of us. We're overloaded. It makes us anxious, you know, constantly watching the news, staying. You know, I call this an adult binky. Right. Like we're, you know, we're attached to it. And I'm guilty of this too, from an information standpoint. I just got this stat. Gearhart. There are 376 billion emails sent a day. If you had a quarter for every email sent in a day, you would have 94, $4 billion or 40% of Jeff Bezos net worth. But the reason that this is relevant for sales leaders today is Our sellers are overloaded with information and content. And so what happens is a lot of times as trainers and sales leaders, we end up giving our people more content. We say watch this course, read this book, do this and they don't know what to do with it. So our job as sales leaders isn't to just give more information, it's to help them filter, assimilate and apply it to win more deals on a consistent basis. And that's what I'm going to be talking about.

So you talk about the four pillars of learning and developing salespeople.

Yeah. And the reason for that is Gerhardt. And I learned this the hard way when I first started my training company. I think it was 28 years ago.

You know, I was always a pretty good speaker. I was a little bit of a ham as a kid. I was doing the talent shows and all that. But the problem is I trained the way I wanted to train instead of training the way humans learn. And so what I do is I get up there and I do a show and I led with the entertainment pillar and I was funny and people would laugh but nobody retained anything. And a lot of people give information and maybe even motivation but to improve sales. It's about transformation and how do we have transformation. And this isn't a spoiler alert. I'll just say we have found and we've done a lot of research and We've now had 912 graduates of our Four Pillars masterclass course. There's Four Pillars for an effective training program for people to learn. The first one, education. You've got to have great content. You've got to have tests right afterwards, you've got to have today, you need to have bite sized learning. You need to create the education over time. You've got to know your technology, that's just great content. But then you do have to be entertained. You got to be more interesting and exciting than this. So trainers, coaches, they need to know how to tell a good story, how to use video, think the five senses. You've got to use movement. And really what the entertainment pillar means is emotional connection. It's making sure people feel safe. But here's the interesting stat. If all you do is those first two pillars like I used to do, your audience is going to forget 90% of what they've heard. 90%. So you have to add the facilitation pillar and the coaching pillar. So the facilitation pillar means you ascribe to the mantra, there's more information and genius in front of me than is in front of you and it's building community and having case studies and, you know, having people do, you know, different projects together, whether you're live or virtual. And we're going to go over that.

How do you do case studies and facilitation virtually? There's all kinds of technology that you can use today. We've got to make our Zoom trainings interactive and fun. And how do you do that and how do you create community with facilitation? And then finally, where the rubber meets the road is that one on one coaching. So if facilitation is to a group and having breakout sessions and really good exercises and pictograms and all kinds of things, think of coaching as one on one. Because too many people think that they're doing coaching and they're not. I call it a drive by shitting Gerhart. What they do a lot of sales leaders is they'll go, hey, to make your sales calls. How you doing? On quota. Well, that doesn't help any. I need to have scheduled coaching calls. We need to know someone's inner world so we can affect their outer world. And so I'm going to reveal a structure for how to do a great coaching call and even some ways you can use ChatGPT and other AI tools in order to advance all four pillars. So that's what we're going to be talking about.

Tell me about the AI tool, how it helps coaching.

Oh my gosh. Well, I invested in a company called Grow AI. I don't know if you've heard of them, they're fantastic. And, and they created a bot called Sassy Sharing S A a S I and the way Sassy works is, and it's actually very good for coaches, is a seller. It's not like, I mean, gong's a great tool. There's a lot of great tools out there, but this is full cycle. So a lot of the tools that are out there now, it's like looking at a game tape after the game is over. What Grow AI helps you do is you'll say, hey, Sassy, I'm about to meet with XYZ company. I have a meeting with the cio. How should I prepare? And it's all voice activated. And what she'll do is she'll tell you, well, if you look them up on LinkedIn, here's the five rules for looking up on LinkedIn. So you're having a conversation with a coach, but then your sales manager gets the information so that the sales manager can help fill in the Blanks. I like an AI.

Here's my analogy for AI tools, all of them. I love football. I love watching it with my 20 year old son. That's why I love it. And I used to be a big Denver Broncos fan. I don't know if you ever followed John Elway back in the day, but Elway, right, had this amazing ability to know there'd be two minutes left in the game and then he'd throw like an 80 yard pass and win the game. But what's interesting about Elway is it wasn't until he had Terrell Davis, a great running back that he actually won a Super Bowl. So I think of AI this way, AI will get us to the 80 yard line, but you better come in and be a Terrell Davis, because if you don't have the human bring it the last 20 yards, you're going to fail. People are going to ignore you. So whether it's Growai, whether it's ChatGPT, whether it's Claude Perplexity, a million tools out there, you better insert the human. You better know where to insert the human. Because nothing replaces human connection and it never will.

Yeah. And catching a pass is a split second decision that requires a presence.

That is uncommon in, in a huge focus. So AI can deliver amazing passes, but a lot of people don't catch them.

It's really good. I know. Thank you for that. Improving the analogy. I love that.

Yeah. I always wondered, you know, if we, we had not done a cover story with John Elway, but with, with Joe Montana and.

He, he talks about in, in Terry Bradshaw and they talk about the blind feel.

You know, talk about the blind fear feel, blind feel. And I said, what's blind feel? And he says, as a kid I was throwing a football on the roof and turned around and based on the sound it made, I tried to catch it. And I missed like hundreds of times until I got that blind feel where I could catch the ball because I could. I was tuned into the movement.

I love that. It's almost like what I think I hear you saying, Gerhard, is that when you've practiced something long enough and you've done it enough that you start to get muscle memory. Right. Is that what I hear you saying? And we say it's gut instinct, but it's not just gut instinct, it's that we're so unconsciously competent at a certain point that, that you feel it and you feel it in your body too.

Right.

I think that what we are talking about is meta knowledge, you know, the way we look at knowledge needs to change because we live in the information age. And in information is like a wave. And if you are not prepared, you get crushed by the wave. If you follow a process, you can surf the wave. But if you go to the highest level, you become the wave.

Bang.

I love that.

Thank you, Sherry. I think analogies explain the.

Gaps that we have in knowing anything. And that as a kid I always ask my grandmother, what does that mean? And she had analogies to explain the world and that stuck with me. So we are both products of really good grandmothers.

Can you share an analogy that your grandmother gave with you?

Well, I think one analogy is, was about giving. I remember sitting in my grandmother's house and she ran a country inn and, and there was this. On Sundays people came back from church, you know, from the latest service, we went to the early service and. And she always says, you, you always want to give more than you take or that you get. You always want to give back. And so I saw this, this woman, I said, this is Julie. What can I give her? And she said, well, maybe bring her an apple. So I grabbed an apple, ran out, gave it to Julie and she was this 85 year old woman and she had that big grin on her face and, and the grin was so rewarding for me, that moment of joy. And I came back to my grandmother and I said, I think I transformed Julie's face. And she says, well, giving is transformative.

I just got the chills. That's really beautiful. I know. Do you find. It's the weirdest thing? I find whenever I, you know, I now have giving Saturdays and I decided that that's my Sabbath and I won't work on a Saturday, somebody could offer me a million dollars. And I, I made a path that I'm not working on a Saturday.

But I will work for free on a Saturday if it's a good cause.

Right.

It's almost like clockwork. It's, it's. I feel like every time we go out of our way and we stop thinking about looking good and instead we do good, it comes back tenfold. And it's hard admittedly not to get caught up in the how it looks and the social media and all of that, just really giving of your heart, giving your vulnerability and giving back.

And there's even a study, Chinese scientists last month published a study where the.

Analyzed micro giving. So when people, poor people actually give maybe a penny or $0.05 or $0.10 to a charitable cause through digitally and they do it for every day and recorded their moods, and they actually discovered it lifts depression, it brings joy to your life. And people feel better about themselves because they gave something that had a little impact on somebody else.

Beautiful. That's beautiful.

And if you're selling correctly, that's what you're doing. Right. We're not thinking about the outcome. We're thinking about really helping that customer and that client and or mentoring that person.

But I think you also take something away. What you're taking away is the customer's problems.

That's right. That's the goal.

Exactly. Well, Sherry, thank you for your time. And thank you for delivering a live keynote from Hollywood, actually, next week at the Sales 3.0 summit, the Sales Transformation Summit. That wouldn't be what it is without Sherry.

Well, I appreciate your continued support, Gerhardt. Thank you.

Thank you.