How to Scale Your Skills for Success with Zach Selch

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Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host, Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders, where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster, and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset goals, time management, and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready, and let's dive into the good stuff.

What up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host, Kevin Dorsey, AKA kd. And today we're going to talk about scaling, but not the way most people think about it when it comes to scale. If you ask most people what they mean by scaling, scaling a business, scaling a company, scaling a team, almost always that focus is around the number of people on the team. We're gonna take it a different direction today and talk about how do you scale skill, how do you scale discipline? How do you scale the characteristics that lead to success for your team and how to do that repeated using tactics that have been proven in other industries, particularly the military. How does the military bring people in with no background, no training, no industry knowledge, and build the skills, discipline, and characteristics necessary to success? And that is why I'm so excited to have Zach Selch with me on the show today. He is the founder and principal at Global Sales Mentor. He helps level up your, your international sales leaders, how to learn how to bring it to a. Another country, another culture, another industry. So he has a very unique perspective on how to scale skill, discipline, and characteristics. I'm pumped to dive in. Zach, my man, welcome to the show.

Thanks a lot, Katie. I'm really happy to be here.

This. This one's going to be fun. So, quick backstory here. Zach made a post, you know, or a comment talking about, like, the military. I sent him a message talking about how I started to study the military. A lot around how did they indoctrinate or how do they get people in that you wouldn't necessarily think, like, okay, great background or anything else, and build the discipline and skills necessary. And you shot me a really great message back. So catch people up on kind of like military experience, like kind of, where does this military mind come for you?

So I was, I was in the military. I was in a reconnaissance unit. I was up Platoon sergeant in an airborne reconnaissance unit years and years ago. And what I saw from this, or what I see, and then I took those skills and I went into sales, right? And what I see from this is the military is basically about training people. Two things. One is to do something that really goes against your natural instincts. And two, it has to be predictable and scalable, right? And let me take this back a little bit. Historically, In World War I, the Civil War, they bring people in and they basically say, hey, you're a farm boy, you know how to use a gun, Boom, we're just going to send you out to the front, right? We're going to give you a little bit of training. And what they found in World War II was people weren't doing a great job, right? 75% of the guys who were trained, young, healthy infantrymen were getting to the front and they weren't willing to fire their gun at the enemy, right? And then historically they looked at this and they said this was happening. There's evidence that this happened in the Civil War, there's evidence that this happened all the time, right? Now we, as Americans watching movies and TV shows, we like to think you hand an American man a gun and he ease off and he's Rambo, right? But that isn't the case. But what does that remind you of? As Americans, we also say, everybody knows how to sell, right? We're an American, we know how to sell, right? That's part of our natural heritage. And you know, just like I do, you put a bunch of people in front of a telephone and you say, cold call, and they're gonna come back with every excuse in the world why not to pick up the phone, right? And if you take a look at this and you say, okay, I got this 17 year old farm boy from Kentucky and I got to make him be willing to run into enemy fire and fire his gun. And I take that same 18 year old farm boy from Kentucky, I want him to pick up the phone and call. Can I use the same things, right? And that's the way I was looking at it. So I was thinking, well, what do we do to teach people in the military to do what they don't want to do? Something that's scary, that goes against their brain. And can we use this in sales training, right? And we can, you know, the riflemen in the year 2010, and I hate that, you know, I hate to make everything about killing people right, about the military, but the riflemen in 2010, the American system for training people in basic Training. Training has gotten so much better because they were using science from the way they were doing it in 1943. Can we use those same lessons, right, to teach people to pick up the phone and make the damn phone call, right? And that's what I'm looking at, is what can we do to create that feeling with people? And you mentioned something, the same thing. You can't take your sales force and, you know, say, hi, welcome to my company. Now I'm going to break your personality, make you miserable, make you, you know, clean the bathroom with a toothbrush so that you're, you know, you're broken. And now I'm going to rebuild you. You can't do that. HR frowns on that, right? Just a little.

Just a little.

But you can. You say to them, look, I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I'm gonna give you what you want out of life, right? You want to be a VP in 10, 15 years. You want a nice car, you want a nice house. I'm going to give you that. That's my promise to you. But I want you to crawl through fire for me, right? I want you to be prepared to do stuff that you don't want to do. Listen to me. Trust me. And you're going to get to where you're going, right? And some people are going to say, screw that, Kevin. I don't want that. Right? That's too much hard work. Great. Take off, do something else. But the ones that are going to stick with it, you build up that cohesion. You give them the skills, and they produce.

Yeah, no. And that's some of the things that I want to try to break down here, right? Is, you know, because we can't. So background on the message, right? So, you know, Zach had sent me that note, and we were talking about some military and some of the things that I called out that, you know, the military can do that we can't do in sex, right? I'm like, okay, like, how does it do this? Discipline? Well, you know, they break people down, right? Like, they really drive people, right? It's almost like you have to break the ego to say, hey, like, we are all level. You've been broken, right? You kind of almost wave that flag to be rebuilt. And we don't have that opportunity really, in sales, but then we think about, like, what are ways we can do it? So now I want to come back to one of the things that you said very quickly at the beginning, right? You were in the military. Part of recon, part, you know, platoon. Platoon Sergeant, and you said you, then you took those skills over into sales. What do you think some of those key skills were that led over to a successful career in sales?

Well, part of that was individual contributor skills, right? Like discipline. I'll tell you what, when I started working, I didn't understand the 40 hour week, right? I didn't understand going home. I was like literally sleeping on my couch, getting up, working, get tired, I'd get some sleep, got hungry, I'd eat something. I was working constantly. But also it was sort of like you think about people say, well, how should you treat your customers? Show up on time, right? These are things, like little things they teach you in the military. Show up on time, treat your people respectfully, think about what the other person is thinking, think about the mission, right? Those type of things. And I didn't know how to do anything differently later on, right? So very often you talk to people in sales and they go, well, I'm confused. I have no idea what my company wants from me, right? I don't understand the big mission now. Every day for years, we would stand there and we would say, what are we doing here today? We are protecting our citizens by doing this. This is the mission. Let me walk you and we talk about it. So when I started to work with my salespeople, I would say, well, what are we doing? What we're doing today is we are breaking down this part of the sales process. We are going on this, on this visit, this visit to a customer. We are going to be doing this. The reason we're doing this is part of this, it's part of this bigger picture in order to achieve our goals 12 months from now, do you understand? Or their questions. And it didn't dawn on me to do it any differently, right? So those are the types of things that I brought in from the military and brought into my day to day work as a sales contributor and then as a sales manager.

Okay, perfect. So I wanted to give that foundation. Those are some of those things.

Actually. Something else was the military is about constant improvement of little tiny incremental things, right? And you know, I'll tell you a story which I probably wouldn't have connected with the military, but when I was about 25, 26, I went into a meeting with some distributors I was training and there was one guy who took the best damn notes I've ever seen in my life and I asked him about it. He said, oh, it's just something I picked up and I asked somebody else and the other guy said, oh, Our boss sent us to this stupid course on note taking, and it was really a waste of time. And this guy was the only guy in the company who actually uses it. Now, this was 1995. Later on, this guy, I found out this guy made a million dollars in commission that year in 1995, which was more than twice as much as anybody else in the company, right? So I look at this and I go, okay, the owner is sending these guys to five or six courses a year, and the only one who's paying attention correlates with the guy who's making a million bucks. This is something I should learn from, right? So this constant learning is also in the military. In the military, half your time you're going to courses. They're teaching you things, and they want you. They're not teaching you these big philosophy courses. They're teaching you how to better clean your rifle, how to shoot at a very specific range. How do you use something very specific, a very specific tool. And you're picking up a hundred of these things, putting them together and achieving your mission. And that's what sales is all about, right? You don't say, let me tell you about how to cold call, right? You're saying to somebody, let's talk about this part. What's your opening statement? What's the question? You ask, right? I can spend eight hours talking to you about a discovery call. And that's just like in the military.

Yeah. No, and I love that because, like, you know, actually, the way that you said it. Right. Actually, that actually, unfortunately, is how most people train or coach their people, right? Let's train on how to pitch. Let's train on how to cold call. And it's not broken down into the small pieces that go into it. My onboarding is so funny. Oftentimes people hated my onboarding.

They were telling me about how long it was, and I could. Yeah, but. But that's what you need to get good results, right?

Well, because it wasn't just long, it was repetitive. We'd spend two days on the intro, right? Just the intro. Two full days on the intro, then two full days on the justification, then two like. And you. And you could see it sometimes, like, I just want to go do it. I'm like, good, you're gonna get to. But we're gonna chunk this down.

But I'll tell you something. And I don't. I don't want to get into politics or anything like that, but we're talking a couple of weeks after the shooting in Texas, right? And everybody's talking about these guys and what people have been saying is, well, these are really well trained cops and they were standing around doing nothing. They weren't trained well enough. Right. So what happens is they went through a couple of hours of training. They show up and there's a huge amount of stress, a huge amount of tension, and they forget everything. They've learned everything. Now you teach somebody and you say, okay, I'm gonna go 15 minutes on introduction. Cool. And then he picks up the phone and he's like. But you do two days repetitive. You wake him up in the middle of the night with a bucket of cold water, and he'll remember what you taught him, right?

Mm. Yep. That was. That was the key. It was a high repetition, focused on the small pieces and going. Right. Because, like, what's the quote? You don't rise to the occasion. You fall to your training.

Yeah.

Or something like that. You don't rise to the occasion.

These guys you trained 10 years from now, they'll be in a different company. They'll remember exactly what you trained them. And I think there's a benefit in this. Remember we talked about, like, getting people to crawl through fire? Right. You're giving them training they're going to enjoy for 30 years. You deserve for them to crawl through fire for you. Right. If you're giving them that kind of training, they should. If they're honest with themselves, they're gonna really produce for you.

Mm.

Right.

And that was always the goal and what I would tell them. Right. Because oftentimes too, for at least half of my team.

Right.

And you said this in your trip. For half my team, for a lot of them, it was their first sales job.

Right.

So they didn't know any different yet.

Right.

They didn't know that that training wasn't normal. They didn't know that that type of structure wasn't normal. So there was a little bit more pushback sometimes, like not knowing. Then they go to their next job and they go, oh, the amount of times I get text messages to this day that say, I get it now. And it works here too. Love getting those texts. Because it's the truth. Right. My goal was never to make them a great, patient, pop salesperson or service type. It was to make them a great salesperson. Salesperson.

Last time I got to tell you this story because it's one of my favorite stories, and it is a little bit of a humble brag, but suck it up. Right. Like last year, this guy who used to report to me years ago, he's In Chicago with his family on vacation. They meet for coffee. At the end of our meeting, we have a nice conversation. He picks up his phone, he calls his kids who are college age, who are in the hotel. He says, come down. I want you to say hello to Zach. And he goes, you remember Mr. Zach? He goes, what Mr. Zach taught me allowed me to buy the house you grew up in and allowed me to send you to college. So I want you to thank Mr. Zach, right? And I just about cried because this is something I taught. I taught this guy 20 years ago how to sell. And he is, you know, now he's telling his kids that, you know, he owes it. All his skills came from me. I love that. Right? That's what I love too, is building up. You know, it's nice to be a contributor. It's a great thing to train people and get them producing.

And so let's take that next step, right, because you made a statement, say, like, you know, things got better around 2010 when the military started to apply science to their. Their training, their boot camps, whatever. So let's now start to talk. Okay, well, how do we apply what we know to be like, good to sales training? How can we carry this over?

Okay, so for instance, what did they find in World War II was, and this sounds really funny, if you weren't in line of sight of a colleague, you were much more likely, about five times as likely not to fire your rifle. Okay, now think about all these movies where you have a guy standing by himself and he's shooting away like Rambo, right? Now, you put people in pairs, they're five times more likely to fire, right? And they just figured that out. So they're like, okay, we are not going to spread people so thin that they can't see each other, because why? They're embarrassed not to do what they were trained to do. Right? So can we apply this to selling? Right, and then by this I'm saying, well, if I say to somebody, you know, do what you're doing. I don't. I'm not really. I trust you. Well, not that I don't want to trust people, but you basically, if you're not letting them know that you are with them in spirit, it becomes harder for them to pick up the phone. Right? Now, like with everything, you want to build up these habits, but those type of triggers building this cohesion. Now, most of the people who work for me aren't necessarily on phones. They are going out to the field, right? But what I like to do is get my People talking on a regular basis. So if you know that on Friday you're going to be part of a group meeting and you're going to be talking to all of your colleagues and you're going to be talking about your week, it's a little bit harder for you to go through that week and not do what you're supposed to do, Right? You know, if we're going months before between, you know, talking about it, then you can, you know, you can find something to talk about. But if I'm coming to you in front of your eight or 10 peers and I'm saying, hey, Kevin, tell me about your week. How did this meeting go? How did this meeting go? Now, that's holding you a little bit accountable. Now, that might sound a little bit. Making people feel a little bit childish or anything like that, but it's human nature, right? It pulls this stuff together and everybody then wants to show off to their peers, right? There's a competitive nature, there's that, right? These are just little things that were picked up. But, like, you know, I think also what you talked about in the beginning, these drilling more, this, this practice, this. What. What would happen if this happened? What would happen if this happened, right? One of my bosses said to me, once she goes, you, you know, Zach, you always have just not just a plan A and a plan B, but you seem to always have a plan C, right? I was like, yeah, I don't know, you know, that everything's gonna go right. You know, I had a conversation on LinkedIn the other day about something, and people were tearing into me about, you know, getting too much into people's personal lives. And I was thinking, you know, what if I'm paying, if I'm spending a few hundred thousand dollars on hiring a guy and putting him on the road, you know, the cost of one of my Salespeople might be 6,700k over the course of the year between salary and travel and commissions. And I see he's doing something stupid that might impede my work, right? It might seem personal. I'll give you an example. There was this one guy who worked for me. I go traveling with him, and I see he's carrying his passport and his hand through the airport all the time. It's always in his hand, and he's moving it from hand to hand. I said, you're going to lose that passport and we're going to get stuck in an airport someplace, or you're going to get stuck and you're not going to be able to do your job. And he said, zach, my suit's too tight. If I put the passport in the pocket, it's going to ruin the way it looks. So I said, dude, you got to get a looser suit. I don't care about that. I do care about your losing your passport now. Something like that. That might seem like I'm overstepping my job as a boss, but I've had people lose passports on a trip, and it holds everything up. It costs me 20, $30,000 in missed meetings, Right? So it's my business. That's the way I look at.

J.