Interview With Zach Selch On Bulletproof Selling

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Bulletproof Selling. My name is Sean Rhodes and I'm the Chief Sales Sergeant here at Bulletproof Selling and author of the book Bulletproof Selling: A Guide for Systemizing Sales on the Battlefield of Business. Now here at Bulletproof Selling, the one thing that we believe above all else as a salesperson, as a business person, as a human being, you should really have a value set, right? Our value set here at Bulletproof Selling is that hope is not a sales strategy. Strategy. Doesn't mean that hope isn't important, but we learned on the battlefield, studying high-performing teams across all branches of the US military and many international contingents, that hope didn't get them a ticket home. They had to rely on something stronger than that, something that they could access no matter where they were in the world, no matter how stressful the situation was, no matter how the odds were set against them. And those were systems. And so here at Bulletproof Selling, we are bringing those lessons from the battlefield into the boardroom, into business, so that we can increase the performance of salespeople and, of course, the results of their teams. Now, in this Bulletproof Selling series, we've got to be pushing close to 80 episodes at this point. I learned just as much from all of my guests as you do, my listeners and viewers out there. We've been able to have Hall of Fame speakers, we've been able to have best-selling authors, sales trainers, coaches, VPs that were actually out there in the field managing teams, and even folks that are at an international level. So folks that are not just managing teams domestically, but Folks that are actually out there in the world managing salespeople from all different nations. And my commitment to you is that out of every single one of these episodes with my guest, we are going to build a sales system that you can use no matter the size of your team or the size of your goals, whether you're a single individual performer out there getting inside your CRM, living that lonely life every single day without having any other people to contact, or whether you're working in a massive organization, you're one of hundreds of salespeople or thousands of salespeople. you're going to get something out of today's episode. Now, the course of these 80 episodes, the ones that I think that I align with the most strongly are the veterans that I'm able to bring on the show. And we've been able to have British fighter pilots, we've been able to have Army, Marine Corps, Navy— you mention it, we've probably had them on the show. And it's always great when I get a veteran on the show because there's no bridge to jump between the value of systems in keeping us alive and keeping performance high and results. And most veterans that I've had on the show don't have a problem at all bringing those systems into the field of sales. So it's always great to have a veteran on the show. It's even better to have a veteran on the show who actually has that sales leadership experience too, not just in the military, but actually out there in the world managing sales teams. And I was a pleasure— actually, I had the pleasure to be a guest on this man's show about 18 months ago. And it is so great to be able to return the favor, to have him back on to help serve my listeners and my audience. I want to welcome back, or actually, well, welcome back into my life, but welcome onto the show for the first time, Mr. Zach Selch. Zach, welcome to Bulletproof Selling.

Hi, thanks for having me. This is a blast. It's good to see you again.

It's good to be here. It is awesome to be here, sir. Now, for those of us that weren't able to catch my appearance on your show, which I'll make sure I link in the show notes so we can get some traffic traded back because you and I had a great conversation too. We did.

We did.

Tell us about you, your background, your experience, Army paratrooper, and now leading actually global sales teams. I'd love to get your background, man. What got you into the field of sales from the military?

So, you know what, it's actually— the military was sort of a stopping ground for me. Like a lot of people, I grew up, you know, I grew up less than affluent. I was dirt poor. And I had this dream dream as a kid that I thought, you know, I realized that when you think about, like, I thought about this idea of being successful and traveling and being an executive. And I thought, well, I'm not going to be a good engineer. And I'm not going to be, you know, I don't really like finance. And I don't think I'm going to be. And I thought about, I thought, well, I could sell. And I realized I actually— I worked as a kid in a flea market for a while, and I enjoyed selling. And I thought, okay, but nobody's gonna hire me. But if I go to the military, I'll get some experience. I'll be able to go to college. I'll be able to make some money. I'll learn some things. So I had this idea to go into the military, and I was living in Israel, and in Israel You know, the military still is very, um, very much— there's a lot of prestige associated with the military, and the units in the military have a lot of prestige. And I decided I wanted to be in a reconnaissance unit for the paratroopers. I decided when I was really young. And here I was, you know, my— you know, I, I— there was none— I had nothing going for me. I was a short, fat teenager, right? So I was like, okay, I gotta work at this.

Yeah.

And I worked really, really hard during high school so that when I got in, you know, there were 125 applicants for every position in my platoon.

Wow.

And I had to go through a lot of, you know, a lot of cycles of testing and all this, you know, the equivalent of Hell Week in American units and stuff like that. But I made it through and that was great. And I learned a lot. I'm not going to say it was a lot of fun, but I enjoyed myself. I learned a fantastic amount. And then I leveraged that, to be honest. Afterwards, I was able to, you know, people said, okay, here are some veterans, you know, who were in these units. They have businesses. Call them, see if they'll give you a job.

Sure.

And that's what I did. And I was able to get my first job literally while I was on the demobilization, the weeks. What they have in Israel is they have a few weeks of demobilization where they're shifting you back into civilian life. And during that time, I was able to get my first job. And I basically leveraged, you know, the work ethic I learned and the skills I learned and all of that. And it really helped me get into my first sales job and then my second sales job. And I've been doing— I got, I got out of the Army about 35, 30, 35 years ago, and I've been selling ever since. And I— my first job was selling used military medical equipment in Africa, and then in Eastern Europe when the wall came down.

And used like it still had blood on it, or used like surplus?

No, it was, it was stuff that, you know, had been bought. Like a lot of this stuff, actually, you know how— well, I don't know if you know this, but let's say the US Army buys something in Vietnam in 1968. And they use it for a few years. When they get rid of it, they don't throw it away. They sell it to a country like Israel, right?

Sure.

And then Israel uses it for 10 or 15 years and then sells it to Zaire, right? And then I don't know what happens after. I'm not sure Zaire ever sells it over, but—

They just stockpile it.

So here I was, you know, we had all sorts of stuff like, you know, field hospitals and field medical beds and ambulances and stuff like that. And I was selling that for a couple of years. And then I went to a medical company and I said, look, I have experience selling medical equipment, and they hired me. And after that, like, so I think to some extent, you know, selling used material is not necessarily the most prestigious job, but— And honestly, nobody else wanted to be running around, you know, Africa selling. So that's how I got, you know, you get these jobs when you're young, you get the jobs nobody else wants, right?

Yeah.

But it got me in. And since then, you know, I've basically— I spent 35 years working my way up. And I was a VP for different medical equipment companies selling internationally for about 20 years. And then last year, I went full time into coaching, consulting, and fractional leadership. So essentially, I am the fractional global sales manager for a number of companies. I sit on a number of boards and I coach people who have been tasked with global sales. So, you know, you think about these guys who were really good domestic salespeople and then somebody promoted them and now they need a little bit of help. And, you know, I help them, and some of my clients have done really, really well. You know, they were doing 10% growth before they met me, and now they're doing 60-70% growth, right? So, you know, just like you said, we're working on systems, right? And there's no reason to think that a person— people aren't born knowing systems, they learn them.

Yeah.

And very often, if you're in a new experience, you're in charge of international sales, Right? You're doing something new and you need a little bit of help. So that's what I do.

And this is something that I'm always curious about because obviously opening up a new market, even domestically in the US, let's just say a company is just domestic, you still have to go through the process of getting in touch with people that have never heard from you, making sure they're the right fit, making sure they have the— I imagine that's compounded in complexity when you start looking at the international scale because not only am I calling in cold, but I'm calling into somebody in Saudi Arabia that Probably doesn't speak the language as well as I do. I have to convince them of all the same things. Walk me through a little bit about how you coach people to open up new markets internationally. I'm really curious.

And that's a great question because what I found was this is exactly what I love doing and most people can't do it or don't like doing it. And that was sort of why I got into what I'm doing is because my wife said most people, they do this once in their life, they get things going and then they rest on that. And here I was quitting jobs so I could do it again because I was bored, right? So yeah, so here's the thing. First of all, you're dealing with different cultural attitudes, right? Like, and you use this example of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabian people are totally different in, you know, that they're very often when you take a look at cultural indicators, there are 13 to 15 cultural indicators. Saudi Arabians are different than Americans in about 9 of them, right? Yeah, they are very, very different from us. So, you know, if you basically reach out and you call the head of a company in Saudi Arabia and you say, hey, I'm the VP of sales of an American company, he doesn't care, right?

No.

He needs to have a personal relationship with you, right? So that becomes really difficult. So I'm dealing with the cultural aspects. Then there are mechanics of sales, right? And by that, just as a Simple thing. Let's say you're selling a widget in Indiana, right? You meet with the guy, he hands you a check or a credit card, you give him the widget. That's it, right?

Right.

But if you're shipping something to Saudi Arabia, there's a— there might be, you know, a truck to the port, there might be a boat, there might be another truck, there might be insurance, there's— and then how do you get paid by this guy, right? How does he make sure he gets his his widget and you get the money, all that kind of stuff, right? And then maybe the Saudi Arabian government says, okay, it's nice that this has American, you know, American electric approval, but now you need approval by the, uh, by the Saudi electric company to make sure that if you plug it in, it's not going to short down the building. All these different things, these are all parts of it. And yeah, and this is exactly the type of thing that I train people and coach people how to do. And what I also have found is that I'm— I have a very, very good system to find local partners. So I was working with a client, reached out to me a couple of months ago, and exactly my target, you know, got 20 years experience, President's Club, extremely successful. Now he's in international sales. He said, I've been working for 7 months, I haven't found a single distributor. What do I do? And I said, okay, here's the deal. And I said, I helped him out. I identified, you know, we identified the 25 markets he wanted to go into. I found him 2 candidates in each market. I introduced him to those candidates. He interviewed them, he chose them. And within about 6 weeks, he had an entire sales organization in place.

Right.

And that, you know, could have taken him 5 years to do that. And he might never have done it. Like, he might have quit the job or gotten fired before he did.

Yeah.

itself, right? So, you know, that's, that's sort of the type of thing. It's real, you know, it's difficult. People, you know, that's why people find the wrong distributors is because they get desperate and they meet some random guy. You know, I've met people who, you know, I talked to them about their distributors and they're like, well, he was working at a hotel. I came down to Brazil and he was a clerk at the hotel.

Right.

Nice guy. So I made him my distributor in Brazil. I'm like, but he doesn't know anything about the market. He goes, yeah, but he was a really nice guy. And he Spoke English and stuff like that, you know. And so I help people get past that. I help people figure out the systems and find this stuff.

And where do you find— this is a question that we ask everyone on the show— where do you find salespeople relying on hope more than they should in standing up new markets, whether domestically or internationally? Where's the chief— and right out of the gate, man, you already screwed up there.

Oh yeah, well, I see this. all the time. Like, so, so one thing that I see internationally is I like to say it's this belief that there's this guy, right? Because it's like very exotic. And people say, well, I understand in these other markets, it's very exotic. And I met this guy, and he told me that his brother-in-law is the king. And so if I just give him 5% of everything, he's gonna get business for me, right? And there's always a story like that. And I was saying to somebody a while back, like somebody said to me, you know, I found this guy and his wife went to school with the president's wife. And so he's going to be able to sell our products really, really well. And this was a few years ago. So I said, okay, so let's walk through this. I said, so let's say You have a car dealership in Indiana, and somebody calls you up and says, hey, I have brake pads, I want to sell you my brake pads. And my wife went to school with Melania Trump.

Right?

You're gonna say, so what? Are they good? Right?

Yeah.

What does that matter? And I said, so why do you think it's different than Nigeria or Saudi Arabia or whatever? I said, They're still going to have to find the customer. They're still going to have to convince the customer that the product is good. They're still going to have to work out. I said, so what we're looking for isn't somebody necessarily who is magic. We're looking for somebody who knows how to handle the sales process. Right. And that's the thing. I see this. I see this a lot, you know? Yeah.

So I'm curious then, is it In your mind, hope factoring in more when I'm building a team or hope factoring in when I'm trying to figure out how do I open up a new market and the entire process along with that?

I think the whole process with international sales, because people, people are confused. You know, I'll tell you what happens with this is you don't get to be the head of international sales or responsible for international sales if you didn't do pretty well at something else beforehand.

Right.

You know, typically this is a promotion. This is a serious promotion. It's the type of thing that people say, oh great, I've been really good as a US sales manager. What do I want as a new challenge? I want to be in charge of the world. I want to be international. Right.

Where do you go from there, right? Mars? I don't know.

So here you are, everything for the past 10 years, everything has gone really well for you. Right now nothing is working, right? You know, and then you're full of hope. So you go to a trade show and some guy comes up to you. And I always look, when you think about a distributor, distributor, for instance, is an outsourced member of your sales team, right? He might, there might be a lot of other things around it. But the bottom line is he is your sales manager for Germany. who just happens to be outsourced right now. Let's say somebody came up to you, you needed a manufacturing person to run part of your factory, and somebody just walked up to you randomly and he said, hey, I would like to run your, your manufacturing facility, and I'm a nice guy, let's have a cup of coffee and talk about it. You're not going to give him that job no matter what, right? Doesn't work like that. But now you go to a trade show in Germany, you're standing there and some guy walks up to you in a nice suit and he says, I'd like to be your distributor in Germany. And he hands you a 50-cent business card with nothing. So you sort of rub your finger at it, you look at it, he says, oh, it says he's the president.

Yeah.

I'll make you my distributor, right? And that's what happens. And I, I can virtually guarantee you, I, I see hundreds of companies like this where all their distributors randomly approached them at trade shows or reached out to them and said, I'd like to be your distributor. Now, very often they're even in markets that company didn't want to go into, but they said, wow, uh, you know, somebody wants to be my distributor in Portugal, I should give him distributorship. Now, that requires resources. Now you have to train him, you have to send him a demo unit. When he, when he asks a question, you have to respond These are resources, right? So some random guy is taking over your strategy and using up your resources. And I see this all the time.

Right.

Now, what's the option? You basically say, okay, I'm going to figure out what the— how many markets can I handle? I can handle 12 markets this year. I'm going to figure out what the best 12 markets are with the best return on investment, the best low-hanging fruit, etc. Then I'm going to figure out, well, what is the distributor that I want for these markets? What does he look like? And then I'm going to go out and I'm going to find him. Simple enough, right? I mean, that's the way you would do it if you— if somebody said to you, okay, I need you to build up a sales team for the East Coast. That's what you do. You'd say, well, I'm going to write requirements, I'm going to recruit these people, I'm going to train them, etc. You wouldn't just sit in your office in Chicago and say, well, if some guy from Boston randomly walks in and asks to be my sales manager for New England, I'm going to give him the job, right? You don't do that. And that's what people do with distribution.

Gotcha. Alright, so it sounds like then the system that I would love to build with you is around opening up a new market, because I imagine that if it can be done internationally well, a lot of those same lessons could be brought domestically. So whether a listener is opening up a new market internationally or whether they want to open up that new dealership chain in Idaho, right, same basic principles are going to apply.

Same basic principles, exactly.

So when we talk about building systems here at Bulletproof Selling, we're trimming hope away from our sales strategy. So I want to build something that a salesperson can use again and again throughout their career to open up a new market or to discover how do I get into that market and start hiring people that understand that market because maybe I don't speak Portuguese and Someone really has to be able to speak Portuguese. So when we talk about TRIM, we use this acronym T-R-I-M, just like in the military, full of acronyms.

Right.

So it's easy to remember. The T is the trigger. Now, if I'm going to pull this system off the shelf and begin using it when I've either been tasked or I recognize I've got to open up a new market, what is the trigger element? Is it when the tasker comes down? Is it something to do with my finances that I recognize if I'm going to hit my goals, I'm going to have to expand further than the markets I'm already in? What is the trigger element for understanding I need to open something else up?

That's a great question. I guess you could look at that 2 different ways. One is you could say, well, is this an internal trigger where I basically say I need growth right now? The very best way that you can add to the value of your company in terms of sales value— if you have a company, you inherit a company from your grandfather and you know that you want to sell it in 7 years, or you build up a company and you know you want to sell it and retire, the very best way that you can— the very best way you can add value to that company is to expand globally into multiple markets. Because let's say you're, you're selling $30 million domestically, right? What's the value of your company Maybe $100 million right now. Let's say you're selling $40 million domestically. What's the value of your company? Maybe $100 million. Let's say you're selling $30 million domestically, $10 million internationally. Value of your company now is maybe $150, maybe $200 million.

Wow. That was exponential.

Right. So that if you put that effort into growing your international market by $10 million, Right? You are, you're doing a lot more than putting that effort into the, into adding to the domestic market, right?

Right. So it's recognizing the value then and then getting it set up to understand, hey, this might have to happen beyond the borders of my local geography. All right. So, right, great trigger. Now the R in TRIM is making this thing repeatable. So what are the 5 or 6 steps that you advise companies follow that are pretty standard? I mean, there's 80 steps under each of them. I get that. But what are the big Pieces of strategy.

The thing is, I like to say you want to map out your sales process, right? And if somebody hasn't done that yet, I'm gonna say stop whatever you're doing, go map out your sales process, because that's really important. But let's say you figure all the different pieces of your sales process, and then figure out what you have to do, what somebody from headquarters has to do, and what you're going to outsource.

Yep.

Right. And what you're going to outsource, that's what your distributor has to do. And that's how you identify your distributor, right? So what I very often find is people say, well, my distributor has to have this, has to have that. But then when they do that exercise with mapping out the sales process, they realize they're wrong, right? What the distributor has to do is sell. And he has to do the parts of the— so let's say your sales process involves you doing a face-to-face demo for 3 different people in the company, right? In the customer. Now you're based in Chicago, you're selling in Indiana. It's a 3-hour drive. The cost of that over a period of time is maybe $10K. Now let's say you're in Chicago, your customer is in Indonesia, right? Now the cost of you doing those demos now is $50K.

Right.

You might not be able to afford that. On the other hand, if the distributor is doing it, then there you go, right? He does it, it's off your table. So once you've done that, you basically say, well, this is what I'm looking for. I'm looking for a market with these specifications. I'm looking for a distributor with these specifications. I'm gonna find those people, right? And there are tricks to finding it. You know, there are different ways of doing that. We honestly don't have time to go into that. But, you know, obviously, if you go to my website, I have lots and lots of material on this. I have a book on this. But what you want to do is you want to find those distributors, you want to identify the markets, you want to find the distributors, you want to onboard the distributors. And again, the more you can standardize Because if you hire some distributor, and then you say, okay, here, I'm going to come out and I'll spend 2 weeks with you, and you'll, you'll learn from me. That's pretty expensive. If you basically say, okay, I have a whole video course.

Yeah.

If you want to be my distributor, you have to log in and you have to do 30 lessons that I've taped on video. And at the end of each lesson, there's a little quiz and whatever. And then at the End of that, we're— I'm gonna come out and spend 2 days with you, right? Then you have an onboarding process, and you can onboard as many distributors as you want over and over and over again, right?

It's, it's, it's never too late to change the focus of these systems. And what you just said is so important to any salesperson. Um, I, I actually just— first time we've ever done this, Zach, we're going to change the sales system midstream because I think it's more valuable for salespeople to understand how do you train someone remotely than it is to open up a new market? Because everything you do remotely, you just mentioned, can open up a new market. But if I need salespeople to do better with their meetings, with their negotiations, with their closing, why not create that video series that doesn't require you to be there for 2 weeks and train in person? And I'm sure you see this all the time. So many people—

I do. And I'll tell you what, this is what's sort of funny is sometime about 5 or 8 years ago, A lot of what I was doing changed. And I started because of this, right? Because of this. I was doing more and more on video because I was saying, you know what I would do? If you go back 10 years ago, 12 years ago, I would fly out to say Egypt. And I would, I would get 20 distributors together from all over the Middle East and Africa. And I would do a 2-week training. And I would be there with one or two other people. And we'd stay at a nice hotel and we'd do this training. Now what would happen would be over a period of a few years, I'd fire a couple of distributors, salespeople would leave. So 2 years later, I'd have to do it again.

Right, right. Repeat the whole process. Yeah.

And I'd be doing it, then I'd do it once in the Middle East, I'd be doing it in Latin America, I'd be doing it in Asia, I'd be doing it in Europe, over and over. And these would— this would be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Right. And then what I did was I said, okay, can I take the whole damn thing?

Yeah.

And make it into an online course, set it up so that when somebody— when I onboard somebody, I say, okay, this is the course, right? And I can, I can see if you've, if you've used it or not, right? Because of the technology. So you have to go through, you have to do them, you have to do a quick Quiz at the end, at the end of that, now I'm going to spend some time with you.

Right. So the element then we have, recognize what the problem is that you need to train around, map the process out. Now we're getting into the repeatable steps, map the process, set it up in a way where you can see that they've completed it. Right. A little bit of live time, which I know a lot of salespeople do virtually now with their teams because they still don't want to travel to Riyadh. They'd rather be like this, you know, in a live stream or in a Zoom. So we've got the repeatable steps. Now, what about improving it? Because that's the I in TRIM. Now, obviously, Israel, very important that you improve these systems we have in the military. So how do I improve what I'm doing with video training?

So I'll tell you a great thing. I worked with this client last year, and they were doing pretty well, right? But they hired me because they wanted to do better. And so they have a very complicated, you know, 12 or 15 different products, and they're great products, really nice. And I'm talking, I said, you know, how do we know that the people, that the salespeople, all these different salespeople around the world, you have, you know, 100 people selling your products, how do we know that they know the quality of your products? And she said, well, I think they do. We, you know, we did training. Now they were doing training on the onboarding, so there were people who had done training 4 or 5 years ago. And hadn't done training again. So I put together this survey, and what I did was I asked questions. This pro, you know, when you're talking to a customer about this product, what are the primary benefits you talk about? When you're talking to a customer about this product, what are the primary benefits you're talking about? Et cetera. Right? I don't know. Twenty-five questions like that. Right? And then I said, do a two-minute video where you. tell me about the benefit of this product, right? And I sent this out to everybody. And people did really badly, right? I think the average score was about 40%. Right? And my client was stunned. And I said, no problem. Look, why should they know something that you taught them 4 years ago? So we put in place a whole improvement plan. Not only could we do an improvement plan, We now had for each distributor salesperson, we knew what they were stronger on, what they were weaker on. And as you know, there are sales— some salespeople are great at this product and some salespeople are great at this product. And the thing is, if they get to be great at all the products or 80% of the products, they're going to sell more.

Yeah.

So now we have this improvement plan and now we're, we're retraining with video and with coaching. all the salespeople on their specific weaknesses. We also added a monthly mastermind for all the distributor salespeople. And what we do is half of it is a general sales subject, right? So they can take that and they can use that for any product, anything, right? And it's— so they love that part. And then half of it talks about a specific product, right? So I run that for my client. We do it once a month. And it's really, really helpful, right? So those are the type of services we do to answer exactly those, those issues.

Love it. So we've got the trigger, repeatable, improvable. Now, the M in this final bit is really what proves that this is worth doing, because otherwise, man, I'll just go back to doing business as I was before. The M in TRIM is measured. How do I measure whether this training is successful? And you're a smart enough guy, I'm going to take one piece off the table right away. It's not measuring gross sales because a lot of things can happen in the market that could affect gross sales. But how do I know this specific system, what I'm training my people to do more, better, differently, is having an impact in a better way than me flying to be on site for 2 weeks?

Well, so there are 2 things. First of all, I'm not going to agree to take sales off the table that quickly, right? Because you might not— it might not be the right thing to do. you the measure of sales immediately. But first of all, what I see is, so when you talk to like McDonald's, they talk about same-store sales and new-store sales and stuff like that, right? And they talk about products. So most companies have more than one product.

Mm-hmm.

And one of the best ways to grow is you take the guy who's really, really comfortable selling product A and you convince him to sell product B just as much, right? So one thing I like to do is say, well, are people who are selling only one product, are they selling more of the other product now?

Right.

So that's a good way to measure it. But what I also like to do in international sales, I like to measure what I call sales hours.

Right.

Now, it's very difficult to do this. But let's say you hire a distributor. So let me do a little bit of math, right? Let's say you get a guy and you hire him and he sits in Chicago and he covers the world for you, right? He's doing maybe 80 to 100 meetings a year. And if he is, he's killing himself because that's really hard work right now. Let's say that guy manages 10 distributors. Distributors, and each one of those distributors has 5 salespeople, right? Then what you're basically doing is now you are increasing this by about 50 times, right?

Hmm.

So this one guy who, let's say, was putting up 100 meetings— let's say for ease, 100 meetings a year. Right now, you should be able to do what, 5,000 meetings a year? Right now, if you can get there and you can measure that. Now, what people very often say is, well, how do I measure that? So it's work, right? You basically say, okay, I want my distributors to be giving me meeting reports, right? I want this to be in the CRM. I want to— I want to see this. And that becomes your work. On the other hand, If one guy who's doing 100 meetings a year is selling $1 million, how much are you selling if you're doing 5,000 meetings a year?

Right? Does it equate to the same number path? Yeah, absolutely.

Exactly.

Okay. Right.

So, you know, so that's sort of where you're going.

So it sounds like then if I'm, if I'm really focusing on training my salespeople that are remote, I can also measure then the time saved in training hours. So if it was 2 weeks on site at 40 hours a week, now that's 80 hours. I only have to film the video once, maybe that's 2 hours. Now I've just expanded my time. So question then becomes, if I'm training 40 salespeople with a 2-hour video, that's 80 hours I've just saved myself, right? Is the result that I'm getting better than what I would have been doing if I'd have been on site?

So here's what I like to talk about, right? What do the Green Berets do?

Right?

What do the Green Berets do? They don't go out and shoot people. No, they go out and they get other people to shoot people.

Yeah, right. Force multipliers.

Yeah, right, they're force multipliers. So let's say a Green Beret can hit a target, just for argument's sake, 60 times a minute, right? Now you get a 30-man platoon of Green Green Berets, what's that? 1,800 times a minute. Right now, if each one of those guys raises a platoon, but the people in his platoon can only hit that target 15 times a minute, not 60 times, they're a quarter as good.

Sure.

But there are 40 of them.

Right?

So how many times is that platoon of Green Berets now responsible for hitting targets per minute, right? Now it becomes, you know, $20,000 and not $1,800, right?

Yeah.

And that's the thing. So you're basically saying, okay, this guy isn't as good as I am.

I'm—

I know my product. I've been selling 35 years. I'm a pretty good sales guy. He isn't as good as I am. But there are 25 of him. There are 50 of him, right? So if each one of them is exactly one-fifth 1/5 as good as I am, but I have 50 of them out there, that's still 10 times as good as I am.

Yep. That's how you make that math work. I love it. So we've got the trigger— repeatable, improvable, and measurable— by degrees of how can I become a force multiplier. And that really might be what we do as sales leaders, the good sales leaders anyway. They become force multipliers by training those teams underneath them.

And that's, that's a great sales And if you think about it, I don't know about you, but I remember the very first platoon leader I had had been a really, really good individual soldier, right?

Mm-hmm.

And I remember he used to basically, you know, we'd go on a training mission and he'd tell the machine gunner to hand him the machine gun and he'd fire, and he'd tell the sniper to hand him the rifle and he'd fire. fire. And he'd have the RPG guy give him the RPG and he'd fire because he knew he was really good and he'd do good results, right? And then they sort of shook things up and they replaced our platoon leader. And the next guy's focus was making sure that we did all the work and we got better, right?

Yeah.

So we very often, very often, sales leaders who are good individual contributors have that thing. They're like, I'll do it. It'll just be easier if I do it, right?

Right.

What you want is you want to get your people. Now, I typically, like, you know, I'm now I'm working with clients. But when I was a VP, I had multiple regional sales managers, right? And my job was to make them fantastic. And they work with multiple distributors, and their job was to make their distributors fantastic. And I look at it I have like 7 or 8 guys I mentored who became CEOs, and I couldn't even count how many VPs, right? Because I would tell people, do you know, I want you to, I want you to crawl through fire for me. When I tell you to jump, I want you to jump. But at the end of the day, I'm going to give you skills so that you are going to be really ready for your next job. And your next job is going to be a big advance over what you're doing now, right? That's, that's my contract. with them. I want to train them and get them ready. And then I don't want to— like, if I am— if I'm in the room, the system doesn't work, right? Because it's not scalable. I, you know, Zach has 120 days a year he can be out in the field, 160 days maybe, right? So that's not scalable, right? I want to be in the room only to be influencing my people To make sure that they can do it themselves, right?

Yep, love it. And with video, that becomes a greater possibility than ever. So Zach, uh, great sales system, sir. Tell us, how do we get deeper into your world? Folks that are out there want to learn more about you, want to connect, how do they do that?

Great. So you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn. I post twice a day something about international sales, every morning and every evening. You can find me I also have a website which is called Global Sales Mentor. You can reach out. I have the— you can set up a meeting there. I have a lot of free tools. I have 118 market briefing documents. So if you are going to Azerbaijan or Turkey or Brazil and you want a 15-page document that'll give you all the information you need to be prepared, prepared to land understanding the market. You can get that for free from my website. But you can find me on the website, you can engage, you know, you can talk to me. And what I do, just so we're really clear, is for people who are tasked with international growth, I cut down on that learning curve, I help them get to the point where they can really do this themselves and deliver and And, you know, bring in results.

Awesome. Well, I'm sure if anyone has any questions about that, they can get ahold of you. We'll be tagging you every time that we release this episode on social media. So thanks so much for bringing that system way of thinking back to us, Zach. So for all of you out there in the world right now, just checking this episode out, make sure that you're following us here at Bulletproof Selling on YouTube where all of these live streams are housed. So many great hours of content with sales leaders just like Zach. Of course, the podcast that we produce on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, anywhere that podcasts can be found. For more sales systems to help you replace hope with certainty, just like the one we built today, make sure you're checking out the resources that we are updating every single day of the week over at bulletproofselling.us. Now, Shawn Rhodes here. It has been a pleasure serving the sales community alongside you, Zach, yet again. Let's get out there and make selling bulletproof.

Thanks a lot.