The Five Immutable Principles of High Performance - Part 1

Hi, my name is Gerhard Schwartner and welcome to Selling Power tv. Today we have a very special guest from Las Vegas, Todd Duncan. He's the co founder of an amazing company called Fuel Inc. Welcome Todd.

Hey Gerhard, it's great to be with you. Thanks for this time.

What I love about Fuel, your website, it has so many binge worthy videos and there's one course that you're teaching that I'm really interested about hearing more, which is your five immutable principles. Can you tell us about it?

We ended up looking at literally tens of thousands of performers and deciding what were the principles that actually helped them succeed at scale that could be repeated over and over and over again. So the first principle is the principle of improvement, which basically says everything can be improved if you're going to improve. Then the second principle comes into gear, which is the principle of success and failure. You can't have one without the other. Number three is the principle of emotional connection. And what emotional connection means is that if I can connect faster with my team, if I can connect faster with a prospect, if I can connect faster with a client by changing the way that I interchange and interact with them, I will accelerate trust and I will then amplify connection. Once we have that, we get to the principle of competence. And what competence means is that anything that we want to do good, we have to see how competence feeds confidence and then how confidence feeds consistency and then how consistency feeds the ability to compound those results, repeat that cycle, and then the last one is that there's no success without accountability. And it's the principle of transparent accountability. Those are the five.

So let's put yourself in a position of a sales leader or a CEO or a CEO. How do you communicate the idea that everything can be improved consistently?

So I think the first thing that I would do is I would understand that my job as a leader is to help people on my team win. And my job is to empower every leader that reports me to help the people on their team win. The obvious way to get to a idea about everything could be improved is a simple question. It could go like this. Based on where you are right now and where you'd like to be at the end of next year, what are three things you know you need to improve and what would that improvement mean to you by the time that we finish the next year? If I ask that question and somebody reveals to me where they actually know they can improve, and then I ask them why that is important to them and what that would mean to Them, then I have two things. I have principle number three, because now I've connected with my teammate and I've connected the improvement with something deeply important to them. I also now have the ability to coach them in what they're doing right now that isn't working with that improvement and what they're not doing and why they're not doing it, which leads to maybe the combination of failure and success. Where. Where do you have fear? Where do you have hesitation? Where do you have reluctance? And then how can I equip you with that? Because everything we're not doing has to be done to get the improvements that we want. And then the third thing is, if I'm that leader and I understand that emotional connection accelerates trust and allows us to be in a more connected state of being, then I can check in with that person every day and say, hey, how's improvement in your sales call activity? How's the improvement going in your appointment setting? How are you doing in handling some of the pricing objections that I know you said you could improve in? Right. And then that leads to principle four. Let's, let's role play this every day for the next week. Let's plug you into fuel and let's have you go through and record the scripts and record the videos and watch them and watch them and watch them. And then every week for the next four weeks, let's measure it through principle five, which is accountability by you and I. Just checking in. Imagine what would happen, Gerhard, if over 12 months, a leader could take somebody on their team that has three things they know they need to improve and, and over the course of a year, double, triple, quadruple their effectiveness in that area.

So let's talk about the leader and the corporate culture, because corporate cultures are basically defined by your second principle, which is look at the organization. How do they celebrate success and how do they handle failure? So what's your advice to leaders?

I don't want a culture, if I'm a leader, where people are afraid to try things the wrong way is the right way because it teaches you a better way. And if you can come out of a sales call and you can, you can go into the restroom, you can look in the mirror and say, you know what? I just learned one of the biggest lessons of what not to do on a sales call, I am never going to repeat that again. Think about how empowering that is, and that's what leaders need to do. People cannot walk around the office, virtually or otherwise, and be afraid to take action.

I think it would be a good idea to put those five principles on a laminated card and chair with a million people done.

That is happening. We're going to have that card designed by Monday. That's a gift. Thanks, Garrett.

Thank you, God.