Episode 13 | Part Two: The New Rules

Gregory Shepard, an entrepreneur who's built and sold 12 businesses, a recipient of 4 private equity awards, TEDx speaker, and Forbes author. This is The Boss Podcast with Gregory Shepard.

Welcome back to the second part of my discussion with Bill Caskey, the author of Same Game, New Rules. Bill, I'd love to dig in deeper to your book. Talk to me about the concept of inner game. What exactly does that mean?

When the book was written, we are unable to use the term inner game anymore because it was made famous by a guy named Timothy Gallwey who wrote a book called The Inner Game of Tennis. And he threatened to— I shouldn't get into this, but he threatened us and he said, look, keep it in the book, But don't talk about inner game anymore, 'cause I own the inner game. And at the time I'm thinking, no, you don't. You don't own the inner game. That's a word, you didn't make that up. Everybody talks about it. But I was at a point where I really didn't wanna deal with lawsuits, and so I said, okay. But really, when you think about it, it is the mindset. The inner game and the mindset are the same thing. But that's the last time I can say that. Okay.

But it's basically this turmoil that, like, You know, when you're— so I'm not— I'm a terrible salesperson, okay? I'm like just terrible.

Oh yeah, if you say that to yourself, you mean?

Yeah, if I, if I get into a situation where I feel like I'm, uh, you know, I don't have the strong cards or I don't have the leverage or something like that, I, I tend to internally kind of, you know, sort of like the, the dog that rolls on its back and it goes, um, um, just can you just pet me? You know, I mean, for a minute.

Yeah.

Like, is that sort of it? So when you talk about this, this whole thing, it's, it's sort of like I get— I'm getting a feeling that the, the power that is internal in the person who is pitching or selling or whatever is almost equal or maybe even greater than the mechanics themselves.

No, I think you're right. I think if you get your mind right and you— and by that I mean You think abundantly. You don't think scarcity. You think about bringing value to a prospect or to a customer versus what can I get out of the deal. You think about what is your intent when you walk into a prospect's office, first call or digital office. What's your intention?

Hmm.

Is your intention to land the deal? Because if it is, it's going to show through and people will resist that. So the 3 major areas of mindset shift are what's your intent, What's your point of view of the world? Is it abundant or is it scarce? And then what are you there to do? How do you bring value to somebody? And if we can get good at that, then guess what? Almost any technique opens up for you. You can use a plethora, I haven't used that word in years, a plethora of techniques and mechanics and language, but if you don't have the right mindset, I'm going to give you a piece of language to use, you won't be able to do it, as I said earlier. So, Mindset is kind of the core foundation, and then the mechanics lead from there. Mechanics become more organic.

It just reminds— we did this podcast with the coach from the Miami Heat, and he was talking about how a basketball team that starts to lose continues to lose. And that's because of the— and that we're using this mindset, right, of the— they're losing, they're losing, they're losing, and then they continue to lose. And what you're saying reminds me of that. Right. That if you're on a roll, you're on a roll. And so what you're saying is just, just do some psychological treatment to yourself to tell yourself you're on a roll and get your mindset right and then get into the pitch.

Yeah. I don't want you to, I, you know, if you're not on a roll, I don't know how much lying to yourself and telling yourself you're on a roll is really going to help. I think, I think we're sorry about that, but, um, I think where this shows up is look, My goal when I walk into this place, this prospect's office, is to see if I can help them.

Mm-hmm.

It's just to see if they have any problems, any circumstances, any financial costs that I can save them. And so then when I show up, here's what I say in the first meeting. I say, look, thanks for inviting me in digitally or physically. I don't know whether I have anything that can be of enormous value to you, but my mission on first calls like this is always to start with a conversation. You tell me a little bit about what you do. I'll ask you some questions if it's okay. I'll tell you what we do. And then at the end, we can decide if it makes sense to schedule another meeting, abort totally, maybe somewhere in between. Is that okay if we head down that path?

Oh, so the confidence is in what you're bringing to the table, and what you're bringing to the table is just discovery. So, your confidence is like, look, we're going to work. I'm confident that we can work together and figure out next steps. And that's the confidence. Is that correct?

Sort of? Yeah. Yeah. But I don't even say that upfront because I don't know if they're getting ready to go out of business or in Chapter 11. Hell, I don't want any part of it. So, I'm never assuming— I never assume anything. I never have any expectation of whether we're going to work together or not. I just feel like it puts you in a one-down position when your expectations outrun theirs. If on the first call they say, look, Greg, I'm really glad you came in today to talk to us about what you can do for us. I will tell you right now, we need what you have. We have money. I've heard how awesome you are. So let's just figure out a way to work together. Well, if you say that, I'm probably not going to go through any questioning. I'm probably just going to say, okay, well, let's talk about how we get started. But usually that's not the case. Usually people are a little bit more reluctant, a little more conservative, judicious. Well, you know, Greg, I've heard you're good, but let's see what you got.

Mm-hmm.

And so then that's when I don't want to have any expectation because I don't want to be attached to my own expectations, which may not even be legit.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, this is a— this is really cool. This is actually very useful. I'm gonna refer you, uh, some of my portfolio companies.

Oh, I appreciate it.

Yeah, no, no, I mean for real. I've got 2 in mind right now. I wanted to, uh, talk to you a little bit about the importance of building your personal brand as a sales professional, and if you could sort of unpack that a little bit and kind of help people understand how do they go about this and why. Yeah. And what are these next steps in delivering insistable, irresistible messages and all that stuff that you talk about in the book?

Yeah. Personal branding is something that I've been talking about, slash harping on for about 3 or 4 years. And I think we all— and again, my focus is on business-to-business sales teams, not business-to-consumer. So my focus is at higher levels where there's complex sales, multiple decision makers, that kind of thing. And I realized that the company has a brand, but the individual salespeople, account people, VPs of sales rarely had a brand that was worth much. I mean, if you have a LinkedIn profile, you have a brand.

Mm-hmm.

Now, you may not spend much time on your LinkedIn profile. You may have just thrown it up one day during a seminar and they said, hey, you gotta have one by the time you walk out of here, so you just put some crap up there. That's not good enough today. Here's an example. I'll give you this real quick example. I've got a person who's in my membership group. It's called the 2X Academy. And he is a buyer. For some reason, he wanted to learn how to sell, but he's a buyer for a Fortune 1000 company. I know who it is. I wouldn't say it because I wouldn't want to, you know, anything. Just, it's anonymous.

Right.

I get it.

But he said, Bill, I get calls from sales. He's in purchasing. I get calls from salespeople and emails 5 times a week. Just like you get deals, Greg, he gets calls because everybody wants to sell to them. He said, here's, here's my process. I go to their LinkedIn page. If they're with a company that I'm familiar with, I go to their LinkedIn page, I look, and I'm looking for, can they bring value to me?

Hmm.

If they can, I will see them. But he said, here's the deal, 95% of the people's LinkedIn pages contains nothing that would indicate to me that they can bring value to me. No video, no content, no articles they've posted. He said, I want people who have published something so that I can say, you know what, this dude knows what he or she is talking about, dudette. So we need to have them in. He says 95% of the time people just have the same old crap on their LinkedIn page. So my recommendation, if you're interested in a personal brand approach, is Shore up your LinkedIn page, get your banner so that it doesn't just have a default blue banner with all the atoms on it or whatever LinkedIn's using today. Spend some time on that, maybe even spend some money, and then publish. Create something. Create something once a week. And one of the suggestions I always make to people, think about the first 5 questions a prospect would ask you once you sit down with them. What would be the first 5 top of the funnel, top of the funnel questions? And just go through. And I would say your first article should be the top 5 questions we get on X product.

Oh.

And just go through them because now you can take that article and you can even send the prospect a link before you meet. You might say, hey, Greg, I know we're meeting next Tuesday on Zoom. Here's an article I wrote recently that might help you see some of the questions that I get typically, and we can talk more about these. Here's the link. So now guess what? You're a published author. You've got something of value. You're starting to seed the ground that you're both going to walk on here in the meeting with ideas and questions and answers. And it's a whole lot better than sending a brochure. A whole lot better.

So I want to ask you another question. So they have this— you've heard of this push or pull selling, right? So pull them versus push them. And I read, and this is emphasized highly, that you discovered, okay, that the best way to sell was not to sell. So, what does that even mean? I mean, a lot of people are not familiar with that.

I'm not familiar with that system. I thought you were talking about it's easier to sell if the customer is calling you asking to buy. It doesn't require a whole lot of Yeah. A lot of skill there. So that's what I think personal branding does, is it creates a situation where people are seeing you, they're hearing you, they're reading you, and at some point a need comes up, or they've watched— maybe they've listened to your podcast, Greg, for a period of time, and then they send it to their CEO and say, you know what, you need to get a hold of Greg. I know we're looking for some seed cap, investment capital, whatever. You need to get a hold of Greg. That's what Greg does. He's a great podcast host. And boom, you're in, or at least you have an opportunity. But if you're not publishing the podcast, if you're just waiting and sending out weird emails and doing all the stuff that we did back in the '90s, you're not brand building. You're just not brand building. So that's why I think it's important that if you're an entrepreneur and you've got a couple of B2B salespeople on your team, get them to start building their personal brand. Don't— it's— we're not talking about in lieu of the company brand. I'm talking about in addition to.

Oh, okay. I was going to ask you because, you know, they— you hear people talking about Sales is dead and now it's all about demand generation. And demand generation is creating content, which is exactly what you're talking about. And I was like, are you talking about creating content for the business or for yourself? You're saying both.

Yeah, I'm saying primarily for your own brand. I've got a client up in Canada, Rogers Telecommunications, and they're a big telecom company. And we had this program we did last year called Prospecting for Success. And one of the things I recommended to all these 1,200 salespeople people was you need to start creating content. And of course what comes up immediately is, oh no, wait a minute, we've been asked by our corporate marketing people not to create our own content because we create content at the corporate level— videos, audios, whatever— they want us to use that. To which I say, you can do both.

Mm-hmm.

You can shoot a video on LinkedIn and say, hey, Bob Smith with Rogers, we published an article last week I think you really need to see. It's about the tech change coming about COVID blah blah blah. I'll put the link in the feed below. Hope you enjoy it. By the way, let me know what you think of it. So that's a way you can post a video. You're not creating content, you're just saying, hey, this article exists, send them to the corporate site. And now guess what? You get both. You get 2 eggs, 2 birds with one stone there.

And lastly, I just want to make sure that everybody has the ability to get in touch with you. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, How would they, how would they get in touch with you?

Well, thanks for having me on. First off, Greg, I appreciate it a lot. If somebody wants to reach out, connect, or consume some of the content, best place to go, billkaskey.com. There's a YouTube channel that's accessible from there and my LinkedIn feed, and that's probably the best place to go. So thank you so much for having me on. It's been really, really enjoyable. You're a good interviewer, and I really appreciate the questions that you had.

If you want to reach out to Bill Caskey or find out more information about him, you can go to billcaskey.com and feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Until next time, namaste, my friends.

Learn more about the BOSS Business Operating Support System at bossstartupscience.com, or you can reach Gregory Shepard at gregoryshepard.com. This has been a production A production of Forbes Books.