Even More Selling Tips with Joe Polish and Dan Sullivan - Episode #15

I'm Joe Polish.

I'm Dan Sullivan and welcome to 10 Times Talk.

Hello, this is Joe Polish and I'm here with who's over there?

This is Mr. Dan Sullivan in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, welcome everyone to another episode of 10X Talk. And we're going to do something that's a follow up. We recently put up our very first episode. Episode before we ever named this podcast 10X Talk. And we put up our very first recording, and there was a conversation where on that episode we talked about the importance of selling yourself before you sell others. And Dan, you shared the first part of an exercise that our listeners could try at home. And you asked them to take out a sheet of paper and answer three questions to intellectually commit themselves to a project. I want you to remind everyone listening about these first three categories.

The actual structure of this is that you asked me at one time what my definition of selling was. And I said, well, there's actually two parts. One of them is intellectual and the other one is emotional. So you don't actually have a successful sale that really works unless there's two components. So you need to first of all, intellectually engage the other person or the other group on a future desirable result that's really good for them. And then the second thing you have to do is get them to emotionally commit to making decisions and taking actions that will actually produce that result. Some people are really great at intellectual engagement and some people are really good at emotional commitment, getting people to emotionally commit. But if you don't put the two pieces together in any kind of selling situation, and all the great religions were created by people who were actually able to sell. You know, all the great politicians, all the great military leaders, and then in our own age, all the great entrepreneurs are really good at intellectually engaging and getting people to emotionally commit. And in the podcast that we talked about, I simply said that before you can actually sell someone else on what it is that you're selling, you actually have to sell yourself. And so I never start putting together a sale by thinking of the other person. I first of all have to sell myself. I'm making the sale. And so I have three questions that get me intellectually engaged. The first one is, what's the purpose? What am I trying to achieve here? The second thing is, what difference is it going to make? What's the importance of what I'm doing here? And the third thing is, what's the ideal outcome when I'm all said and finished? What's the big change that's going to happen here, that's really bigger and better. That's usually what people are looking for in their lives, is bigger and better. So for myself, if I'm not real excited by the time I get to the end of those three questions, then I'm not going to sell myself, But I can be excited there. But then I have to move on to the emotional side of it.

Let me ask you about just the whole ability to persuade other people is so critical in how you get through life. And most people are never taught in typical school how to actually persuade and how to sell others, let alone themselves. Do you think it's more difficult to persuade yourself than it is to persuade other people, or is this. Is that a context thing?

Well, I think it's sort of a chicken and egg thing that if you get really good at persuading yourself, there's also an increase of the skill of persuading other people. And your success at persuading other people feeds, you know, and actually reinforces your ability to sell yourself so that there's an upward spiral of your confidence, but also your confidence of actually being able to persuade other people. What I've noticed, Joe, and you and I have a common history of going back and seeing entrepreneurs at their very earliest stage. And in both of our cases, the person we were seeing most was ourselves. And you can remember yourself late teen years, early twenties, and I was a little later starting than you were. But basically you were out there. You weren't real, sure. But the moment that you could really, really get yourself real excited and real focused, then that carried over to being able to do it with other people. And the success then built your confidence, and your confidence made you more skillful.

Yeah. So the whole term selling ice to Eskimos and all of these analogies and cliches that come up as it relates to sales. I've often thought that people that are very effective at persuasion and let's just not just say with themselves, but with other people, tend to be viewed as, you know, there's words like hustlers and there's things like that. There seems to be. I think. I mean, I wanted to get your perspective on this. There seems to be a lot of maybe jealousy and envy of people that appear to be really good at persuading and leading others from people that don't do that. Why do you think that is?

Well, I think, you know, it's coming from a lack of an ability, and there's two ways to handle the fact that someone's better than you One is that you can learn from them and get better yourself, or you can criticize them and hope that they stop doing what they're doing. And so I think in life, when we see people who are smarter than we are, more knowledgeable, more skillful, more effective, more successful, then you've got a choice of 2 responses. You either go to school, you know, in other words, you say, well, this is marvelous because it's obvious that I've got a lot to learn from this other person, or you can say, I want to set up the conditions where I can stop that person from doing what they're doing. You can see this in the political spectrum, there's a lot of what we call politics is actually based on enormous envy and resentment of other people's unique advantages and their superlative and extraordinary skills where we ourselves refuse to actually learn from them. And so if you're not on the learning team, you're kind of on the resentful team. I love it.

I love it. That's great. Okay, so you mentioned also that on the last episode we would share two more categories to emotionally commit yourself. What are those categories?

Well, actually, what you have to do is you have to get in touch, Joe, with two drastically contrasting possibilities. One is where absolutely the worst thing happens as a result of what you're thinking about doing. And the other one is where you can imagine and emotionally feel what the best would be. And I do this a lot. So the exercise that I'm actually describing here, in the average week I would probably do this whole thought process about 10 times, this self questioning process. So I'll write down what it is that I want to move forward on and I got to sell it to somebody and I'll say, well, what's the worst that can happen in this situation if I do it badly? And there's two ways of doing it badly is not doing it at all. And the other one is trying to do it and really failing at it. And I will write down the worst possible thing that can happen. And a typical sort of thing was that instead of really clarifying and giving people confidence and giving them a sense of new capability, they get very, very confused and they don't know what I'm talking about. And they're very, very resistant and they actually get very, very angry at what I'm doing. And as a result of that, it's a complete disaster what I'm trying to do. And I'm actually worse off than if I had not started off at all. And you know, as a result of this, I'm depressed for two weeks and I don't get anything done. My relationships fall apart and I stop working and I go bankrupt and I lose all my possessions.

You say this jokingly and stuff, but do you really take yourself through that mental well, degrees?

I just gave you the complete scale there. I just gave you the complete spectrum. But people do those things. And quite frankly, I have lost my relationships and gone bankrupt. And I actually know what that feels like. But the whole point is that if you don't state your fears going into a situation and you don't lay them out, then the fears are going to go into the situation with you. But if you state them before the situation, then your mind says, well, that's not going to happen. It seems kind of ridiculous. And oftentimes when I sometimes share this with other people, this statement, this worst result statement, they actually laugh and they say, well, that's really, really funny. And I said, yeah, it's really funny. But the fact is that what I'm doing is I'm making sure none of those uncertainties and anxieties and possibilities are actually going into the situation with me. So by actually saying what's on my mind and actually giving voice to the worst thing that can happen, I'm setting it up that emotionally I'm going to reject that. And then that frees me up to actually state the best possible situation. And for me, I'm always looking for a sale that not only achieves its objectives, but it actually opens up new doors that I never thought about. And Joe, both you and I can relate to a lot of other people that we know that they were trying to sell one thing, but in successfully selling that, they actually opened up opportunities and tapped into capabilities and resources that were way beyond what they were after. But you have to be after something very, very specific. And so by doing that now, I've created this enormous difference emotionally. You know, the way I'm feeling things, I've created this enormous difference between the worst that can happen and the best. And it's kind of like a principle from physics, you know, the electricity principle is that you don't get electric charge until you create a differential between the positive and the negative. The more extreme you can move the positive charge away from the negative charge, the bigger differential you get and the more electric power you get. And I find that that's true from a motivational standpoint and a commitment standpoint on part of individuals. If they've stated to themselves the huge difference between the worst possible result and the Best possible result. But they've been real clear about it and they've really been very specific about it. Then they get this huge emotional charge and, and that was the emotional commitment I was talking about as the second part of what constitutes really great selling.

Yeah, I mean, compared to the average person and the whole concept of boredom. And I have a difficult time imagining how people can per se, get bored. I experience more of maybe frustration or just not up to my skills or capabilities than per se boredom. So I could understand getting bored with doing something, although being incredibly involved. I wanted to ask you about is this a good way of keeping yourself out of traps? Well, of course it is. I mean, I'm asking sort of a question I sort of know the answer to, but I want more clarification on how you think this relates to people. You know, even getting to a place where they're just in a bored place. They're not growing 10 times, they're kind of chugging along and stuff. And I think a lot of it is they just haven't taken them through this process of, you know, best and worst and they've not sold themselves. So they're kind of stuck in this place. It's not too bad, but it's not fantastic either. And so they just chug along. Does that make sense?

Joe, I think you made reference earlier about the fact that people aren't taught this in school. And I think probably the skill which is mostly hit or miss or it's haphazard that human beings pick up and the really successful human beings somehow pick this up and that is how to sell yourself on a bigger and better future as a fundamental life skill. Like before I would teach math, before I would teach English, before I would teach any of the formal studies that make up education, the biggest thing I would do is to teach a young human being, you know, a child. And I think you can start this off really early, probably in the six year old range. You can teach them how they can actually create their future with their own imagination. And that is, what do I want? What do I want to accomplish? What difference is it going to make? Why is this so important to me? What's the ideal outcome? So if I get there, what's great about it and then be able to express in the emotional realm the worst result and then also the best result. I mean, if you just got children by the time they were six or seven years old to have this almost as second nature, you know, it's almost built right into their nervous system, is built right into their Brain patterns, then in any situation they get into, that is formal education or formal study, they're just going to be able to create the best possible result in mastering that discipline and learning. So I think boredom is the inability to intellectually engage yourself with a future desirable result and the inability to emotionally commit yourself to making the decisions and taking the actions. And so the result, the opposite of that, you know, the lack of engagement and the lack of emotional commitment we call boredom. That's what boredom is. And then what people try to do is that they try to get the outside world in the form of entertainment or the kind of activities that actually result in addictive behavior, because something outside of themselves is giving them the sense of stimulation and excitement which in fact, their own brain could provide to them. They don't need anything from the outside to actually intellectually engage them. But if their brain has never learned how to do this, and their emotional system has never learned how to actually commit, then it's got to come from the outside.

You know, speaking of addiction, which is a whole other complex issue, the original big book, the Alcoholics Anonymous book blue book that was first authored by Bill Wilson, called Bill W. And Dr. Bob, someone had showed me, I mean, I'm sure this is. You can find this on the Internet, the original transcripts that were edited of the first introduction into the big book, where actually they changed the word sell because he said, I want to sell you. I think it was on the steps and used the term selling people on it, but they felt that they had to change that term selling, because it might be misinterpreted when they were wanting to help addicts, sharing experience, strength, and hope and laying out the whole steps of the program. But Bill W. Who was a stockbroker, and he basically was a salesperson, and so he had to first sell himself on recovery, the form that never existed before when Alcoholics Anonymous was created. But what was most fascinating to me me is that everything in life, just like your definition, is getting people intellectually emotionally engaged in a bigger future that's good for them, getting them to emotionally commit. And even with something like the treatment of addiction and alcoholism, originally it was a sales job, but he actually knew that the public would respond negatively to the term sell you on this or sales. So it was changed. But as I've said before, and you so well explained in strategic Coach to all your clients, is that's where everything starts. You're going to fund your business by profits. Profits come from selling something. But if you can't sell yourself, first Then good luck with trying to do a confident job to the marketplace. A couple things I want to point out, Dan, and have you go a little deeper on one, is you made the comment about opening up doors you never thought about. I think one of your greatest skills and one of the greatest contributions you've certainly ever made to my life and to many other entrepreneurs is when someone's in strategic coach and you're taking them through any of the great tools, a strategy circle and impact filter. You have this term strategic byproducts, which we've talked about and we'll continue to talk about all the time, because I think people just forget this, and it's definitely not trained, is when you're pursuing something, you're going to open doors up, you're going to come across things, things are going to happen that would never happen if you weren't going in this particular direction or pursuing this particular path or making this sale on yourself and other people. So talk about that because it's so darn valuable.

Yeah, well, it's kind of interesting, Joe. Somebody said, you know, what's the difference between people who are great salespeople and people who aren't great salespeople? And I said, well, the difference is that people who are great salespeople think selling's a really good thing, and people who aren't great salespeople think selling is a really bad thing. If you don't like something, you're not going to get very, very good at it. So, I mean, it's just one of those pretty obvious kind of recognitions. But to talk about strategic byproducts, one of the things that I've really spent a lot of time is watching where various kinds of breakthroughs happen, where, you know, all of a sudden there's a new way of doing things. And you see this a lot in technology. So I'll just focus there. The reason why steam power was created is that Great Britain, where steam power originated, ran out of wood. They were burning wood for fuel. And, you know, it's a small place, relatively, and after a while, they just basically used up all their forests and they. There was no more energy essentially, for doing anything they couldn't heat. So they had to switch over and they discovered that coal burned. And they found that Great Britain has massive amounts of coal, but you have to dig very deep into the earth to get to the coal. And one of the problems they had is that Great Britain has a lot of underground rivers. So the moment you would dig a shaft down to get the coal it would fill up with water, it would flood in from the sides. And they had to figure out a way how to pump the water out so that the miners could actually get the coal out. And they found that any of the ways of having people up at the top turning something and sucking water out just didn't work. And they realized that they needed something with significantly more powerful. And the basic first steam engine was really created to actually pump the water out of the mines so that they could get the coal out. So the steam engine is actually a byproduct of the attempt to keep the mines from flooding in such a way they couldn't get the coal. So if you look at all of technology, generally speaking, the greatest breakthroughs are where someone was actually trying to do something else. And along the way they had to invent something or they had to improvise. And as it turns out, the improvisation or the along the way solution turned out to be a much bigger achievement and turned out to be incredibly more valuable than the thing that they were actually trying to achieve. There's no coal mining in Great Britain anymore, but they have massive amounts of power and electricity, which is simply the result of technological development that first started with a steam engine that was used to pump water out of the mines.

Well, so I guess to use the word power, I mean, they got their power they needed, they just had to go through many iterations in order to figure it out.

Yeah, I mean, there's a long history between steam engines and the power generation that we have today. But if you look at each of those, and oftentimes it's because you're running out of something. You know, there's nothing that spurs on human creativity more than running out of something that your quality of life, your existence is actually going to depend upon. And that's the problem you're trying to solve. But along the way, you solve another problem and you have to come up with different kinds of solutions than what presently exists. And those different kinds of solutions are oftentimes the thing that really takes everything to a completely different level.

So let me ask you about, because I always want to recommend to our listeners to obviously, if they latch onto what we Talk about on 10x talk, how do they actually go deeper with it other than just listening to this? And of course, being a strategic coach member is a very smart thing. Out of all the books that you've written, which ones do you think would help people the most? I guess for selling the Dan Sullivan question about the DOS conversation. But what else would you recommend that people to take what we've talked about here and go deeper with it. What should they read from yours that you think would be most helpful?

Probably how the Best Get Better is sort of like a description of the fundamental concepts and tools of the program. But the one that I think is probably my best one, which is also the most recent One, is the 80% approach, where what I'm selling people on, you know, because I'm one of those people who actually like selling, I'm selling them on. Whenever you start something, just start it and get as much as possible done so that you can hand it over to someone who has abilities that you don't have. And don't try to be the person that does everything from start to finish. 100% that has, you know, it's been out for about six months. And that has probably created the most amount of creativity in our several thousand entrepreneurs. It certainly created the massive amount of creativity in my own team. And I think the reason is that there's nothing that unsells you faster is the notion of perfection. You know, in other words, I'm not going to do this unless I'm absolutely perfect. Well, that immediately stops you from doing 99% of the things in life. And the other thing is I have to know exactly what the result is going to look like at the end before I'll even take the first step. The 1% that's left, it'll get rid of the 99% there. So I think that the biggest problem, if I can use a phrase, to actually experience the thing that keeps people from actually being successful is getting ready to get ready to get ready. So people will have a goal. And they say, yeah, but I have to really, really get ready. So I'm going to have to study. Maybe I'll even have to go off and do a course before I can do that. And then they say, well, yeah, but I don't have the funding for that, so I'm really going to have to make sure I have all the funding. And by the time they actually take their first step, they've delayed the. Started the project by a couple of years. You know, meanwhile, the world has passed them by and the thing that they were thinking about doing may not even be relevant to, to the conditions that they're in. And I just noticed that people are always delaying. They're finding something else that has to be in place before they actually take the first step. Whereas if they would just go through the thought process that we're talking about here, Joe, is what's the purpose here? What do I want to achieve? Importance. What big difference it'll make? What's the ideal outcome? How are things better off as a result of this? And then emotionally commit yourself. You know, do the worst possible result. The best possible result. If you get good at this, it takes about 15 minutes. And then there's a third part and that's actually putting the measurements which tells you whether you can actually win or not. And being very, very clear about how you're going to measure success is sort of a offshoot of the intellectual engagement and it's an offshoot of the emotional commitment. But you can do that whole thing in a half hour and you're off and running because you could probably do five or six actions yourself and you could get the interest of three or four other people who have skills that you don't. You're often running. So I'm more and more seeing this whole notion of taking the fastest first step possible as the key to success in the world, regardless of what you're doing. Yeah.

Awesome.

Awesome.

So thank you, Dan, and lots of insights for this episode and what I want to point out. I had this discovery since we've been doing this that never occurred to me because of one of my team members named Rachelle who's been listening to 10x20 talk and she was giving me feedback about how she's thinking about life, how she's thinking about perfection and procrastination and trying things. Just because what you just said reminded me of that. And if you have a team of people and you want to grow your company 10 times, we're basically creating some training materials for not just you, but for your team. So if you have people that work for you, you would be well served to get them into this mindset simply by getting them to subscribe to 10X Talk and sharing this with anyone. That is important to you that you want to be in the same mindset. I mean, that's one of the reasons why people come to Genius Network and go to Strategic Coach is they want to be around other like minded thinkers that have these same goals and objectives and want these outcomes. So getting people into the same level of conversation is really important. On the next episode, Dan, I want to talk about transactions to transformations. You're great at explaining that, so we'll do that. And so anything else before we wrap this one up?

No, I would just say that this whole concept around perfection and procrastination I've actually gotten more feedback from. We have a parallel program in Strategic Coach. So we have a program for the entrepreneurs and then we have a program for the team members. The greatest feedback I actually got is from the team members where people come up to me and say that that made all the difference in the world. I can't tell you what this has done just to get projects going. And it's unfortunate. And maybe we can spend a whole podcast how the educational system, starting in nursery school and going right through to graduate school and university actually reinforces procrastination and perfectionism. And that's the reason why you've got such a high unemployment rate among college graduates, even people with graduate degrees these days, is because their brain is being trained in 100% perfectionism throughout the first 80% of their life. And then they're thrown into a marketplace which really rewards people who are just able to get off to a fast start and set up teamwork to create a much bigger result than they could before. You know, I mean, we could talk about that. I think that's a great topic because I think that there's a huge collision now between the way that people are being educated and how the world is actually developing. But every entrepreneurial company is actually a school. So your staff members are actually at school and they're learning all sorts of incredibly useful things by being part of an entrepreneurial business that they could never possibly learn in the school system.

You know what? I just decided to switch gears. That's exactly what we're going to start the next episode talking about that one because it's important. And I think that leads into what I wanted to talk about. Anyway, so for all our listeners, we've done an episode on the 80% approach. I've said this before, and I'll say it again and remind all of our listeners a lot if they're brand new to 10x talk or if they've been listening since the beginning. If you want to observe a great company in action, you should actually do business with that company. So go to strategiccoach.com, pick up some books, pick up how to best get better. The Dan Sullivan question. Just lots of great tools there. And if you fit the criteria for Strategic Coach, where you make a certain set income, it's all there on the website. Then inquire and see what it's all about and see if it's the right fit for you. And I've always told people just going through the sales process of Strategic Coach is a great way to actually observe how a great company does it, because you'll probably want to become a client and become a member. So until next time, thank you, Dan, and we'll see you on the next episode of 10X Talk.

Thank you, Joe.

Sam.