GSM David Masover

Welcome to the Global Sales Mentor Podcast for conversations that drive growth. When you are ready to grow your international sales, join the conversation with your host, Zach Selch.

Hi, and welcome back to another episode of Conversations That Drive Global Sales Growth. This is a sort of a special episode. I've asked my friend David Massover to join me. David runs his own podcast, which is a really, really good podcast. He had me on as a guest a while back. It's focused on B2B sales. And David will introduce it in one second. But I've asked him to come on to this episode to ask me a few questions. Because this is a sort of a special episode to introduce myself to potential podcast guests. So David, welcome. Thank you so much for your help. Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself and your wonderful sales hat?

So in case you're not watching on video, I'm wearing my hat that says sales hat in big block letters. A friend of mine Corey Bray told me he used to say in meetings, let me take my sales hat off and be honest with you for a minute. So, you know, it's not like that. But yeah, thanks for the nice introduction. I'm David Massover. I do have a podcast called Driving B2B Sales Revenue. Zach was one of my first guests. And, you know, if you're new to Zach Selch, then you're in for a treat because there's lots of good stuff and lots of good stories. And, and I'm absolutely thrilled that you've asked me to come on to this special episode and ask you a couple of questions as the as the interim host du jour so that your listeners can get to know you a little bit better.

Great. You want to jump in?

Absolutely. So let's just start with, uh, you know, let's just start at the beginning. You, you run a company called Global Sales Mentor. What's that all about?

Thank you for asking that unexpected question, David. So I essentially help and mentor global sales leaders, and the basic idea is I always say you are, let's say, a fantastic regional sales manager. And one day somebody says, hey, you should be the VP of international sales. And now you know how to sell, you know your product, but you don't quite know how to sell internationally. And that might take you years to figure out and really ramp up where you're supposed to be. And by that time, you're off to your next promotion doing something else. And that information can get lost to the institution. your ramp-up time, you're losing millions of dollars in sales. I can be the guy standing next to you, helping you out and making sure that that ramp-up time, you know, doesn't take very much time at all, or might not take anything, and really help support people. And my sweet spot really is for manufacturing companies under the $200 million range, more or less, because they really have a huge amount of potential for international growth.

And typically they're not Now, Zach, you and I kind of bonded around this idea of global sales. I'm an American, but I moved to Europe 17 years ago, back in 2004. And prior to that, I had never really done a whole lot of international business. And all of a sudden, I'm in a whole different place. And yeah, you wind up—

We're not in Kansas anymore, right?

What's that?

Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore, right?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, and I came in with this idea, gosh, I want to be able to sell to the world. I wonder how it's going to be different. And, and that's just it. You don't know. And, and you, you learn through the school of hard knocks, uh, what you can't—

No way. Nobody's out there teaching it. Nobody's out there helping you. You got to learn it yourself. And you can do it. Lots of people learn it. But the question is, how much does it cost to learn? How much— what's the opportunity cost of figuring this out yourself, right?

Yeah, how many times are you gonna stub your toe? How many opportunities are you gonna lose? It can be pretty painful.

That's exactly it. And nobody, you know, what happens is we like to think that we know how to sell and we all like to think we're pretty global and pretty sophisticated and all this. And then the thing is, not all, you know, not all markets are France, right? Not everything is based around our favorite European vacation destinations. Do you know how to sell in Nigeria? Do you know how to sell in Bangladesh? And those might be the right markets for you. And that's really where it's difficult because you have to understand the value of culture. You have to understand how you learn a culture, how you figure these things out. There's also all the different mechanics of sales, right? You know, I, I like to say you're selling something in the United States pretty clear-cut where the money changes hands and where the goods change hands. And that's pretty simple. You're selling something internationally, where the goods change hands, who owns it at what stage, you have 100 different variables. Similar thing with the money. How do you get paid? All these little things. But really, the, the most important thing is figuring out how do you present data to your customer and how do you build rapport with your customer in an entirely different culture halfway around the world? And this is what, you know, we're working on trying to teach people and make it easier for them to generate more revenue.

Now, Zach, how did you get your start in global sales?

First sales step I ever had as an adult was really in global sales. I was selling products in Africa, Because I wanted, you know, I wanted a good job, and it was a job nobody else wanted, basically. And so I jumped into selling stuff in Africa. I was selling used military equipment in Africa, and then in Eastern Europe and the old Soviet Empire.

So you were like that Nicolas Cage movie, Lord of War, right?

In a very, very small way. It was nowhere near as lucrative. But that's really like, I was driving around old dirty streets talking to, you know, talking to people about, about, you know, old Cold War military surplus stuff in places in Africa and then in Eastern Europe and stuff like that. And that's, that's what I was doing my first 3 or 4 years in sales before I could get a job selling, you know, new out of the factory stuff. But basically, I spent, um, about 10 years, 10, 12 years as a regional sales manager getting to know different parts of the world. And I did it because I didn't really have any responsibilities at that point. And I knew that when I wanted to be a VP of global sales, and I knew that if I knew more and more territories as a young man, I'd do better later on. So I took a lot of horizontal jumps to get to know more territories. And that's one thing that I'd say differentiates me. I don't know anybody else. I've never met anybody else who did that. But it gave me a really good global perspective of understanding different territories.

So it certainly gave you no shortage of stories. I've known you for a while, I've heard a bunch of them. I didn't know about the used military equipment. Like, the hits just keep coming with you, Zach.

Well, I'll tell you what, I, um, I, I, I'll tell you, like, I'll, I'll connect this to a story with my daughter. One of my daughters when she was about 6, she came home from school and she was having a lot of social troubles with other kids. And she said, yeah, they asked today in school what our favorite food was. And I said, well, there's this little restaurant around the corner from the Sorbonne that has the very best baked chicken. And I said, could you not have just said baked chicken? Right? You know, I was like, Could, you know, do you really have to? Everybody in that room now thinks, oh, that's that pretentious little blonde girl, right? And, and so to be honest, yeah, I have thousands of really good stories, but I find that if I'm at a party and I say, well, once I was talking to the Minister of Defense of Zaire, you know, um, those type of stories don't get you invited back to a lot of parties actually, right? Because, you know, they're sort of conversation killers.

Well, you know, that, that's a great segue to talking about your podcast. I mean, there's a lot of podcasts out there. Yeah. Did you start yours just so you'd have a place to tell these stories without turning people off from inviting you to the next podcast or party?

Actually, no. My vlog was more about me telling stories. My podcast was more trying to get other people to talk so that I could learn and get more ideas out there to more people. So what sort of differentiates my blog— my podcast? Obviously, there are a lot of sales podcasts out there, and I'm not going to— you know, there are people who are really, really solid about individual contribution talk on podcasts, and there are people who talk about sales ops on their podcasts. My focus is entirely on growing global revenue through the sales process, and that's really what I focus on. And I love to pull in people because you get stories One of my guests had done mostly telecom in Southeast Asia, and I had another guy whose focus had been on Russia. I try and bring in lots of different stories like that. Some of them are people who help global salespeople, like people who deal with shipping insurance, and some people are people with actual on-the-ground experience. I'm trying to pull together a nice collection of stories that are going to help people With global sales growth.

So, so who specifically should be listening to this podcast? I mean, if there's someone who you think is really going to get the most out of the kind of the stuff you're talking about, what's the sweet spot?

You know, my sweet spot in terms of the customer is really the people who should be listening to this. If you are responsible for global sales and, you know, if you're responsible for global sales period, this is something you should be listening to, right? Because you're going to pick up ideas and stories and concepts and all that, all directly related to driving global revenue growth.

Now, you've given us this impression of yourself as a guy who's got a million stories to tell. Just for sport, you got to lay one of them on us today.

So I was just talking to somebody the other day about a friend of mine who died. And he— it was a great story. He brought in to this meeting, he set up a meeting with a senior executive In Russia, he set up this meeting to bring in a very senior technical asset to come in and do a demo. And he brought the technical, the technical guy in and didn't ask him to speak at all. And in the end, he brought with him somebody he had found, an old army buddy of the customer. and asked him to come in, and they hadn't spoken for about 20 years. And he got this guy to— like, he basically brought him in and just let him and the customer talk, and that was the whole meeting. And you think about it, like, if you were looking from the side, you'd say, boy, you spent, you know, $20,000 plus a week of this technical guy's time to bring him in, and you didn't have him say a word. Right. But you think about the genius of this, where, yeah, he spent all this money, but he needed a pretext to get the meeting. And then the meeting was all about this gift of reconnecting this guy with his old friend. And it was such a powerful rapport-building tool with the customer. Now, this is, this is pure genius, right? And, um, you know, so that, that's a story, a story that doesn't actually involve me, but I thought that was just a great story that I, I was thinking of the other day because this guy, this friend of mine, Rafi Harit, just died.

They say relationships matter in sales, and I, I think if, if, if I've ever heard a story to articulate that point, uh, that really drove the point home, it's certainly that one.

Yeah, and if you think about it, and this isn't like, this isn't a story of like, you know, getting a guy a hooker or something like that, right? This is like, he showed the customer that he cared enough to do the research. He showed the customer that he cared enough to bring the customer something that was very meaningful to him, right? And if you're gonna do that, the chances are you're going to service your— that account well, you're gonna deliver. Right. So, so I think, yeah, this really shows the genius of that building rapport in a difficult situation. And there's no way, you know, some other guy comes in with a bottle of $100 whiskey or a $1,000 bottle of, you know, fancy Japanese rare whiskey, you still can't beat what this guy did, right?

I love it. Now, Zach, this has been a great introduction to kind of who you are, what you're all about, what the podcast is all about. Other than I Obviously subscribing to your podcast. What are some other good places to find you and to connect with you?

Well, thanks a lot. So I have a website. It's globalsalesmentor.com. There's a whole lot, about 200 episodes of my video blog, my vlog around that, dozens of articles you can access from there. You can get to my articles that have been published in different magazines and newspapers. You can get my book on Amazon. Everything can go through there, but, you know, that's, that's pretty much the very best way to find me, David.

Now, if I was really the host of this podcast, I would say, that's awesome, I'll put all that stuff in the episode notes. So now the onus is on you to do so, but I'm guessing, I'm guessing that's in your interest, so maybe you will.

I will make sure to do that. Thanks.

There you go, that's the spirit. Listen, this has been some really good stuff, Zach. I'm, I'm looking forward to enjoying more episodes of the podcast, seeing more of your great content on LinkedIn, and Thanks, as always, for the pleasure of a conversation with you.

Thank you so much for hosting today, David. Take care.

Thanks, Zach.

You too.

Thank you all for listening to Conversations That Grow Global Sales. Please join us as we come out with more and more episodes.