Sales Isn't Sleazy - If You're Doing It Right | Lisa McLeod | 636

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Lisa Earl McLeod. She's a bestselling author. She's a consultant. She's a keynote speaker. She's an executive coach, and she's recognized as the creator of the Noble Purpose business philosophy. So I love the creator of a philosophy, because most philosophers are no longer with us. She's spoken in over 50 countries and her LinkedIn Learning work has been utilized by over 2 million people. She's been published in HBR and, uh, I'm lucky enough to spend some time with her today. Welcome, Lisa. How are you?

Thanks. Now that you've put me right up there with Plato, I feel like I have to say something.

Well, I mean, that was my first choice. You were the backup. Plato's people called in sick. So, uh, you know, we'll do what we can with that. So let me ask you this. How, uh, uh, how did this happen? How'd you get here?

So to give you the truncated version, it's really in the last 10 years that the two lanes of my life have come together, the two driving force lanes of my life. And the one most immediately obvious driving force lane of my life was career-driven. I started out in sales, worked my way up to a VP of sales. So I was very much someone who had a business mind, who believed in commerce, who focused on numbers, created a really assertive team. But the other lane of my life was much more philosophical and soulful and spiritual. And my belief that we're put on this planet to make a difference with our lives. And so For a long time, I felt like those two lanes were competing with each other for time and space.

Usually the, the outcome of someone sort of dealing with that conflict is pick one. Yet you chose to kind of pick both.

Yeah. And it, I, it, it wasn't just so much that I picked both, but I had a fundamental belief that these things should be, that were not in conflict. And a study I did about 10 years ago of top sales performers revealed that the people who sell the most actually have a strong sense of what we now call noble purpose. They truly wanna make a difference in the lives of their customers. And so what I saw at the time was I saw those two mindsets, this I'm here to make a difference, I wanna change the world, I wanna make the world a better place, was relegated to the social workers, ministers, teachers, You know, low-pay jobs. And it was assumed that sales organizations, which is what I primarily worked with, were these ruthless money-grubbin', you know, close-at-all-cost killers. And actually that is not true. The research tells us a very different story. And I often say sales is one of the few places that we've allowed to be defined by the people who do it badly. Yeah.

So stay there a minute because it's so interesting to me that if you've got a kid in college and you're paying whatever ridiculous—

Oh yeah.

They just send you—

I've done 2 rounds of that. Thank you very much.

So you're paying your 70, 80 grand a year and you get the sweatshirt and, and, and all that sort of stuff. And they tell you they're going into something like sports marketing, communications, social work. You say, oh, lovely dear, that's great. Right? But if they tell you sales, you're like, oh my God, where did I go wrong? And as a parent, but I look at it the opposite and say like, listen, if, if there's one thing everyone needs to know how to do, whether you're an internal corporate person or a salesperson, is to sell, whether it's your ideas, your beliefs, your product, the services, whatever, which encompasses communication and empathy. There's so many things that a real person, uh, a real salesperson that's good does it. And I, and I never heard it framed the way you just did that. It's a profession where the worst get to define it for all of us, right? Because there are bad— Everything's, but we don't define the worst doctors by the, the, you know, the kill rate or whatever.

I, we all know there's bad doctors. We know there's bad teachers. Like every profession has that. But what's interesting is what people perceive of as sales behaviors, this pushy, grabby, aggressive, don't listen, don't care about you. There are salespeople that fit that mold, but the research tells us they're not successful, not over the long haul, and they're especially not successful in B2B sales.

Right. So is it that they stand out more in our minds 'cause those experiences are so horrific than— Yes. Oh, 'cause a classic B2B salesperson, they're consultative, they're collaborative, they know you, you're not making a unilateral decision. They, there, there's a, there's a right easiness to it. And maybe it's just not as sexy or, or so out there that you say, I just had a really great sale call from my friend at Oracle. Isn't he lovely?

It's interesting 'cause I was talking to a friend of mine who's in education. Yeah. And she is a, she works for a large school system, a really big school system. And she makes the decisions on a lot of their paper and materials. So that's a small part of her job, but she's the one, she does all their graphic design. So she has to decide. And we were talking about this and she said, oh God, some of these salespeople that call me, they're just awful. I hate these salespeople. And I said, well, how do you decide then if they're all so bad? She goes, oh, I never do business with any of those salespeople. I have a few trusted colleagues that I work with. And I was like, well, they're salespeople. They're just actually good at it because I mean, it's just like if you think about a doctor, a doctor's got to diagnose you. They've got to fill out the insurance form. They've got to complete it if they want to get money. And we don't ever think that it's irrelevant that a doctor infused that with compassion and care and love. We expect that.

Sure.

And, and the insurance does not pay them extra for that. Okay.

Yeah, but you also don't have a mentality that says, oh, my appendix hurt. I'm gonna wait until the end of the month to go to the appendix guy cuz they're gonna give it away. Like the myth is in the car business where like, I'll hold off on that pain for 2 weeks because they're cutting deals on appendicitis. Append—

at the end of the month. And so what's happened is sales has been defined by a lot of onesie-twosie sales reps that are selling you something one time. They're selling to a consumer. And you got the worst of them because you were the walk-in, or you got the worst of them because they were cold calling you. And so what we know is that actually organizations that have the true north to improve life for customers and sellers who have that same true north outperform the market by over 350%.

So, so I, I, I wanna flip the perspective on that. So if you're performing by 350%, I would also suggest that the person doing the selling in the latter description is more satisfied, is more gratified. I mean, I can't imagine the sleazy used car stereotypical poor salesman gets up every day and really enjoys that. Maybe they—

let's go.

Yeah.

Well, it's, well, that was the thing when I talked about these two lanes of my life. What I saw was I saw, I had a lot of clients who were VPs of sales. So as a consultant, I had clients who were VPs of sales, chief revenue officer, CEO, and I saw them becoming increasingly frustrated that they were being commoditized by their customers and that they were not differentiated. But then the other thing I saw, which is where I found the answer, was I saw salespeople who felt the same, that they felt like I'm just some transactional hustler here. I'm only as good as my number. I make my number one year, that starts, the clock starts ticking again. And so everybody was wrapped up in this thing and the corollary. So you have unhappy sales executives, unhappy salespeople, but then the corollary is you also have unhappy customers because they don't feel like there's anybody that they can trust. And so the whole thing becomes this hustle transactional culture that no one is happy with. And it also winds up not being that profitable because you sort of have a race to the bottom.

Yeah.

And so what I stumbled upon, quite frankly, by accident in this study of a sales team, really brought together. So you asked me about my journey. So that moment. And I guess now it was closer to about 15 years ago, because the first book I wrote out was about 12 years ago. That moment when I saw in front of me this thing that I have in my heart, that I want to make a difference in my work, that I want to help people in a way beyond the money, is actually not unique to me at all. It was present in the top performing salespeople. And they articulated it very clearly. And when I saw that, it was off to the races because that's when I realized this economy that we create may make a great movie, but it's not how people really live.

So I love that. They're sort of shattering the stereotypes there. If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. I want to segue a bit into, 'cause you talked about your sort of journey as a thought leader. Let's talk about the sort of the evolution of your business, right? So you've written, what is it? I'm trying to read your shelf as I'm talking to you. 5 books.

I've written 5 books.

5 books. Okay. So I can't do 2 things at once anymore. So 5, yeah, 5 books. So one way to describe you would be an author, but I would also argue that the percentage of your annual revenue that comes directly from the sale of those books probably wouldn't warrant that. So what—

we all know how that works.

Yeah. What's your business and how does— how's it evolved and who's paying you to do what? Let me ask it that way then.

So you ascertain correctly. So most of the work that we do is in a B2B space.

Yeah.

And I have a business partner who's also authored a book, um, Elizabeth Letardo. She wrote Leading Yourself. I think you had her on, but most of our work is in a B2B space. And it is for sales-driven organizations. So it's usually we're doing both consulting, coaching, and training. We're doing a little bit of those. A lot of times I'll coach the chief revenue officer. We'll do a consulting project and we'll have some training around it. And it's around helping an organization get clear on how they make a difference to customers. And there's a lot of talk about value prop and The value prop language was well-intended, but I believe it led organizations to these very generic definitions of their value prop that lacked the emotion to stir a passion in anybody. So when we work with an organization, we make, they may already be clear. We just worked with Hilton and they had a clear purpose to fill the earth Light and warmth of hospitality. Conrad Hilton said it 100 years ago. Oh, wow. And our job as consultants and trainers is to take that all the way through the organization so that every person in the organization is clear on their role in that. So you have this, I often say our job is to take the emotional, seemingly gauzy feeling and put it into somebody so they know what to do differently on Monday morning.

Yeah. So there's, I, and I love that because oftentimes, listen, you read the value prop statement and, and it, it rarely says to aggravate and frustrate our customers, right? It's usually something to strive for, something idealistic, something positive. But how do you see it, feel it, taste it, touch it day to day in the interaction? It's what's, and, and, uh, I, I remember the, um, one of the taglines that Ritz-Carlton used to use before the acquisition Mariat was ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and serving ladies and gentlemen. And you're like, wow. Like they're starting with the employees because everybody knows Ritz-Carlton serving a bunch of well-to-do folks and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But to, you sort of equalize that instead of saying, oh, this is, you know, there's a different class system, whatever. That tells you something about how you show up to work that day.

And it, and they train for it. So when my younger daughter was 18 years old, she worked as a hostess at a Ritz-Carlton restaurant. I watched her be trained for this, and I watched an 18-year-old who'd worked at a pizza place before learn what it meant to be ladies and gentlemen and learn what it meant to serve ladies and gentlemen. And that's the thing that so often happens that I saw, you know, purpose, we call it noble purpose, purpose, mission, vision. Words only mean what we think they mean. But I was with a client recently, and I can say this because I'm about to do an article about it. You're working with the division of ThyssenKrupp, and I was on stage with the president of this division who has just achieved exponential results. And he said, our challenge was to take it from being a poster to something that lives and breathes inside of all of our people. And that when we show up, customers can see it and they can see it in a way that makes them wanna buy from us.

So when you talk about your business being sort of the consulting, the training, the coaching, how, I mean, let me, let me put it this way. A lot of the clients that we work with, the struggle or the challenge, maybe even the opportunity is they're in the sort of high-ticket, low-volume business, right? There's only so many engagements they can do a year. Getting embedded and being a high-level coach and a high-level consultant, et cetera. But then they add onto that a low-ticket, high-volume business, meaning, right? A, I'm gonna work with the senior leadership team to set this up. But if you look at, you know, you mentioned Hilton, well, they have tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people, right? Can't afford to bring you in and have you travel the world delivering this to the frontline folks in Denver one day and Cleveland the next. So how do you offer a derivative of your intellectual property, of your thought leadership that's accessible or democratized to more people inside of your client organizations? How have you, how have you wrestled with that?

Wrestled is the operative word. Okay. Yeah, that is the operative word. And that, that has been one of our biggest challenges. And so one of the things that we've done is gotten really good at creating customized learning programs for companies. Okay. And teaching them how to do a train the trainer. So, Again, we've been pretty public about our work with Hilton and they've talked about it where we get to the point where we've got the hotel manager at the Hilton Garden Inn in Vietnam pushing play and saying, okay, we're all going to talk about, here's our purpose. Here's the video. Now we talk about how do we do this? And so we do something we call meetings in a box where we do these for our clients. The challenge though. Like so many people that you help is to get that low-cost, high-scale offering and get it to the right people. Because I'll be honest with you, many times when we've tried that, we've gone from that B2B sale to a B2C, and then we have a lot of consumers wanting our stuff and they take a lot of handholding and take a lot of work. And so to be candid, that's, that is one of our biggest business challenges that we're still working on. So we've done it successfully a couple times, but we haven't gotten to that low labor place that we need to be.

Yeah. And that's where the, I, I think that's part of where the magic happens. And the, you know, the prereqs today, you have all of it. You've got language. I mean, some of the prereqs are language models, methods, frameworks. You can't scale charisma. You can't put charisma in a box. Not that you don't have charisma, but in the abs— you know, there's a lot of folks out there that are speakers that are great.

Yeah.

Underneath the sizzle, there's no there there, right? So that's not a teachable piece, but you know, even the languaging of noble purpose, it leads one to say, tell me more. What do you, what do you mean by that? Right? Not putting you in a customer experience bucket where there's a bunch of generic stuff.

There is some differentiation and that has really helped us. And I, I'll tell you one of the things I was thinking about your audience and other people who are thought leaders, aspiring thought leaders. We're all aspiring, I guess, to the Plato level. But I was thinking about one of the big challenges, and it's a lesson I've had to learn a time and time again, is I could sit here all day and talk about selling with noble purpose. This is how great it is. This is what it does. But it's not nearly as interesting because I'm spouting my solution as if I dial it back and go back to what was the presenting problem.

Yeah.

And, and I think that's one of the challenges with having compell— even compelling thought leadership is there's so much on the internet now. There's so many catchphrases. There's so much out there. And so you've gotta have the ability to speak very crisply to the presenting problem that is causing pain.

Yep.

And then link your solution to that afterward.

And the mistake, the avatar, who you speak to, what's keeping them up at night, and how noble purpose is the answer to that. And I think you're right. A lot of thought leaders can't get out of their own way and they start with all their stuff and they don't have the understanding of the contextualization or the, what would it mean to relieve this person of this pain in their role in the growth of their organization? Their career, their team satisfaction levels, that sort of thing.

Well, and the crazy thing is they often do have that contextualization because that's how they came up with the thought leadership in the first place.

Yeah, that's true.

But they forgot it.

So some of this is just revisiting an old friend, I guess, or, or, uh, yeah.

Well, and it's like, I look back and I was so excited to write the book and I went out talking about the book and then I realized No, you're, you studied the problem. You felt the pain of the problem. Me. You identified the solution. You got to take them through that same journey. What is the problem as they're seeing it? What is the pain of the problem? What is the, the win for solving the problem? They've got to go through that journey with you before you can describe, here's how I would recommend the new way I found to solve the problem.

Yeah, great point. Well, this has been fantastic. As we get to the, the end of our time here, any advice that you would give to the someone, whether it's you or someone in the position you were 10, 15 years ago, earlier in your journey as a thought leader?

Yeah, I would give two pieces of advice. Um, one I'm gonna give to me, one I'm gonna give somebody else. To me and the people like me, I know you're excited. Go back and speak in compelling terms to the pain of the problem.

I love that.

That's that advice. And the second piece of advice that I would give, and I actually work with a lot of colleagues and friends who I give this advice to, is do not make the mistake of thinking that because you have to sell your ideas, it cheapens you. Say more.

Because a lot, a lot of thought leaders don't want to Either they can't, they don't know how to, they feel like, ooh, it's icky, whatever. If you can't sell it, nothing, if, if nothing gets sold, nothing.

And let go of your idea of the Glengarry Glen Ross. Let go of your idea of icky sales. You're right. It's disingenuous and it wouldn't work. And what I often tell people is if you had a life-saving vaccine, and you were having trouble getting people to take it, or let's use the example of Jimmy Carter. He wanted to solve the Guinea worm problem and he had trouble getting people. He had the answer, just do this, but he had trouble getting people to take the advice and incorporate it into their lifestyle and get their water differently and do all these things differently. So what did he do? He went in and said, help me understand where you are. Let's figure out the pain of the problem. Let me show you that I understand the pain of the problem, and then we'll get you to here. And he wasn't annoyed. Well, maybe he was privately annoyed. I don't know. But the reason I bring that up is if you have some thought leadership around how to be a better mentor, around how to be a better coach, around how to be more innovative, you need to go in and the way to you sell it is to demonstrate a true understanding of their situation and then position yourself. So it's an ordering thing. Yeah. I love that. So, so my advice would be don't let the idea that you have to sell it feel like it's cheapening your ideas. Instead, care enough about your ideas that you're willing to go to the communication dance to sell them.

Yeah. I love that. Thank you so much. This has been great. I appreciate your time. Thank you so much for sharing.

Thank you.

Thanks. To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter@thoughtleadershipleverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.