The Inaugural Podcast- Mike Adams joins us in a conversation that drives global sales growth

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. So thank you very much for joining us. This is the inaugural episode of my podcast, Conversations That Drive International Growth, and I have with me Mike Adams. And Mike, wrote a great book. He's wrote a couple of books, but I read one of his books about 2 years ago, and I thought as I was reading it, this guy does a lot of international sales. This guy must be a lot of fun. I should talk to him. So it's taken a couple of years. We've been in touch on LinkedIn and we correspond quite a bit, but now we have an opportunity to have a little conversation. So I'm going to introduce Mike Adams, who has a company that He teaches sales stories and we'll get into that in a little bit. But maybe, Mike, you can introduce yourself and we can talk a little bit about your international sales experience.

Yeah, thanks very much, Zach. I'm delighted to be on your show because this show combines the 3 topics of most interest to me, which is international sales, storytelling, and selling itself, and selling. So well done. I think you picked the perfect sweet spot if you only need an audience of one. Yeah, Zach, look, I would like to back up maybe right to when I got my first job out of university, out of what you would call college, which was an international posting straight from university. I joined a company called Schlumberger, which is a technology company, but it focuses on the oil and gas industry. Schlumberger invents and uses electronic instruments to help oil companies find oil. And that was my job. And so I joined straight out of university. And the very first thing that Schlumberger do is send you to a training camp for 4 months. And the camp I went to was in North Sumatra, in the rice paddies of North Sumatra in Indonesia. And I had— I think I had an experience there in that training course that equipped me for my entire international sales. And I would like to tell you what happened there. We had something like 18 students from all over the world. Chalamet is one of the unique companies, certainly back in the '80s when I joined, but even today it's what I call a transnational company. And what that means—

So I gotta interrupt and ask one quick question. So where were you from? You're Australian?

Yes, I'm from Australia.

But where were you from when you grew up? Like, where did you go? Like, when you got shot out to Sumatra, where were you coming from?

I grew up in Tasmania, which is an island to the south of Australia. I used to love bushwalking and sailing, and for me, going to Indonesia to go running electronic instruments was just an extension of adventure. From my childhood.

And you're suddenly surrounded by people from all over the world, right? Which I'm guessing was—

Yeah, we had 2 Saudis, 2 Indonesians, 2 Americans, 2 Australians, Malaysian, Venezuelan, French, British, like you name it, we had people.

That's wild. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And the training course was super intense. It went for 4 months and you did an exam every week, and if you didn't pass the exam, you got kicked out of the school. And they had this league table. So they had like, you've got your score and so—

And you were compared with everybody.

Well, no, with our colleague, not every country was doubled, but you know, there was typically a couple from those countries. But when you looked at this league table after about 3 weeks, what you noticed was all the people from English-speaking countries at the top and all the people who had English as a second language at the bottom. Bottom, right? And this—it was so intense. This training—it went six days a week, and on Sundays all we would do is just lie exhausted at the bachelor house. That was all all guys in those days, right? But these days, of course, Shlomo J hires as many women as it does men. So I was thinking with with one other with one of the American guys actually was very adventurous, and he wanted—he didn't want to work all weekend. He wanted to go and explore Sumatra on the weekend. And we were thinking about this league table and we're like, well, we would like to stop on Friday night, do our exam early Saturday morning, and go touring Sumatra. So we talked to the guys in the bachelor house and quite a few of them were struggling and the reason was English language.

Yeah.

And so we went to the camp, the training course manager, he was an Indonesian actually, and we said to him, look, we want to finish up Friday night, we want to have our exam Friday night, And he said, well, that's impossible because, you know, you guys will fail. And we said, well, if we guarantee that everyone passes the exam, will you let us do the exam Friday night? And he said, well, okay, we'll do it for one week because already there were people failing, right? So we basically, we just completely changed from solo study to group study, and all the English-speaking guys helped the Saudis and the— well, the Saudis left for a different reason. Schlumberger was paying fortune for an Australian engineer, but it wasn't enough money for a Saudi engineer. But that's a different story. So anyway, we got them all passing, and the training course manager could see what was happening, and he let us have our weekends off. And we went all over Sumatra. We took a bus to Padang. We went surfing off the west coast of Sumatra. We went riding motorbikes to Lake Toba. It was absolutely brilliant, and we got to really get to know you know, 16 people from totally different countries and help them learn to pass. All very bright people, right? All electrical engineers or geologists or, you know, they all had degrees from good universities, but they didn't speak English. And that was such a brilliant exposure to international business for me because I realized at that point that people are just people.

Hmm.

And there's smart people from everywhere. And once you get to know how they think a little bit, and, you know, what they like and what they don't like, you can, you can work with anyone.

And I gotta ask, sorry, this triggers a question in my mind. So going forward, how often did you have a team that was made up of an Australian and an American and a Saudi and an Indian and a South American, right? Because I found over the course of my life, that was I did that all the time.

All the time.

Right? And you end up, like you said, when you discover that in the beginning, you know, and you just— now you do have to, and we'll talk about that maybe a little later on, you have to make allowances for the cultural differences. But the bottom line is you can put together the strongest possible teams like that, right? That's your experience too, isn't it, Mike?

Yeah, look, I would say Schlumberger had— it's a very advanced company in HR because they hired people from every country in the world depending on the number of engineers they might need in that company. So if they think they might need 200 engineers in Indonesia, they'll have 200 Indonesian engineers in the company, but they'll spread them all over the world. So when they need an Indonesian manager, they'll hire an Indonesian manager who's got international experience to come into Indonesia. It's a very forward-thinking company. But the typical situation for me throughout my oil and gas career, which went for 17 years, was people from all over the world in leadership positions, but most of the staff from the country that you're working in. So mostly I would be working out in the field and I would be the one expatriate and they would be all Indonesians, you know, and I have to learn to speak Indonesian, I'd learn to speak Russian, you know. I got to live and work in 9 different countries and I have to say, very different living in a country compared to flying in and flying out of a country.

Yeah.

I've done that as well. There's a huge difference when you get to experience what it's like to live, you know, more than a year in a country.

But the one thing I get the feeling of, because I think you and I had that same experience of being the expat who was in charge of a team of locals.

Yes.

And my feeling is that that's changing now a lot where people are trying to get a local, you know, local people. You can get, you know, very good. Look, 25 years ago, it was a little difficult to get good, well-trained Indonesian or Indian or maybe Russian business people to run the team. Whereas today it isn't, right? You can get those people. And I think it strikes me that a lot of companies are doing that and there are maybe less opportunities, which isn't a bad thing for expats because why take a 22-year-old college graduate from America and ship them off someplace when you can find a local person who can do it, you know, better, right? So I think that seems to be a trend I'm noticing. How— you agree with that, Mike, or are you seeing that too?

There's absolutely no doubt that international companies are recognizing the huge talent that exists in local countries. And I feel like, you know, we should talk about things like racism and colonialism, maybe even, because to a certain extent back in the '80s, the expatriates, you know, and I worked a lot with American and Dutch, you know, Shell or British oil companies, right? So our clients were not multinational like Schlumberger was. They had all the managers from the US if it was a US company and all the staff local. And this was a— I'm going to call this a sort of a bit of a colonial setup, you know.

Oh yeah, yeah, I get that.

Yeah, it's sort of an assumption there that the guy coming from overseas is the smart one and the local ones need to be told. Now that, of course, my story right at the beginning tells you that I sure don't believe that and that's not true. But I do think there's tremendous value in what Schlumberger did, which is taking people from all over the world and mixing them up internationally. Because the big issue is culture, particularly business culture around ethics, around corruption.

Yeah.

That's a massive issue. And I had the experience in— I'm not going to name this country because we don't need to pick on countries, but it was It was one of the countries that you might expect was low on the Transparency International scale. And Schlumberger made the decision to go from 12 managers of the different divisions in this country— it's a big country— and these were— there were probably 10 of them were expatriates and 2 of them were locals. And they made the decision, no, we're going to have all locals.

Mm-hmm.

We're going to put in all the local country people and they will manage the business. And I was working as one of the expatriates in that business and I'd been there already 2 years. And I knew that that wasn't going to work. I knew that we were going to get— I just in my bones knew that wouldn't work because those managers, even though they probably had experience from around the world, being with their country people would very quickly take them back, not to the international culture of Schlumberger and the ethics of the international company, but back to the local company. And within 6 months, there were serious fraud issues and they had to reverse that decision. So the big advantage of mixing up nationalities is that you can inculcate an international culture of your company. This is how we behave and move people around without necessarily going down to the lowest common denominator culture of a particular country. Because if you're doing international business, you have to maintain a cultural level of, we're not going to win our business by bribery and corruption.

Yeah, definitely. I got to tell you a story that sort of touches on that. I worked with a guy who was a fantastic sales guy, fantastic regional sales guy, smart, great, great seller. He was a tank, but he was not very politically correct by American standards. Right. And he came from a country, like you said, a country that was a little bit different. I'm not going to name the country. And he was coming to America for an extended period for vacation. And he was going to be by headquarters, and I was in a panic because I said to my wife, I said, "I'm going to have to fire him very soon. He is going to do something that I'm going to have to fire him." And I wrote him this this memo, which I called "I Will Have to Fire You Memo," and I said, "I don't want to fire you. I want you to be happy. But if you ask a secretary to do your laundry, I will have to fire you. You know, if you try to." women in the factory, I will have to fire you. If you insult somebody in the cafeteria because he serves hot dogs, I will have to fire you. Right? And he was very offended and we talked it through and he learned so much after that from that. Right? He really was mad at me at the beginning, but in the end he ended up working for that company for years doing really, really well. And he said, yeah, you know, cause he was doing things that were totally unacceptable from the American HR perspective. And, you know, that was a problem and there was nothing I could do about it. So, you know, anyway, that was the type of thing that happens with these cultural things, right?

You know, when I worked in Russia, Zach, that was back nearly 20 years ago. I got this panicked call from our Houston head office and they said, we've got this guy here and she's told me his name. He's just turned up in our office to pay an invoice and he's brought a paper bag full of cash. And she was like, there was panic in her voice, right? And I've got my CRM system, like, you know, I'm at home actually at the time because it came late at night and I'm opening it up and I go, well, how much cash has he got there? You know, she told me, I said, yeah, that's the right amount, give him a receipt, you know.

Well, I gotta tell you, I love this because these are stories that nobody else gets. I flew into Nigeria once. This is also about 20 years ago. And my distributor meets me at the hotel the first day. And he says, yeah, I owe you guys some money. And he hands me $30,000 in cash in a little suitcase. And I'm in Lagos. And I'm like, I could get, like, I could get killed for this. I don't want this. So he goes, no, no, you know, the wiring fee would be $2,000. I'd just rather give it to you. So I said, okay, I'll take it, but you got to give it to me at the airport leaving and I'll give you a receipt. And I did. I took it back and I went right to my office. And, but I was scared that like carrying that kind of money or even having that money in my hotel room would get me killed in Lagos. Right.

Absolutely.

Nigeria. Yeah. Let's go back to the whole issue of, of racism and culture and all of this. Cause I've, this is really interesting. And I think, What we do get is, on the one hand, you know, I just wrote this book recently and my copy— and I was saying how, like, I said, you know, I was talking about this example about Greeks and I said, well, Greek culture is they are uncomfortable with uncertainty, right?

Yeah.

Which is a cultural, like, you know, if you take it, there's a cultural aspect with business culture. So if you plan around it and there are ways to react to that. Copy editor was like, well, you can't say that in the 21st century. And I said, but, but no, this is, you know, culturally, the Greek culture, this is one of the aspects of Greek business culture. And to do business with them, you should plan around this.

Yeah.

So there's sort of like those type of things. And then there's, you know, the racism where you say, well, that group of people is, is not as stupid or, you know, or not as smart or whatever. And we have to balance that out. And I think, like you said, you find that when you're dealing with people, I've dealt with some incredibly competent people from all over the world. Very often, much more— you deal with somebody from a small country in Africa that you might not expect it, and you realize he's much more competent than anybody in your headquarters, right? And you get that. But on the other hand, you also have to understand the differences in culture, right?

Yes.

Because there are differences in culture, how people react to time, for instance, right? You know, some people— so do you have any cool stories about that, Mike?

Yeah, I do. You know, we're just going to go for 16 more hours on this podcast. So look, I think that one thing that I think that many people are not clear on is what does it mean to say that we have a Western style of business or Western values? Because people throw these terms out there. And I have a strong view on this because I'm also a student of philosophy.

Mm-hmm.

And for me, a Western system is a system built on reason and questioning what is true. We don't take an authoritative view of what is true. We question authority. In fact, the Royal Society, which we could say is the start of Western thinking in England— the British Royal Society was started in the early 1600s. And their motto is in Latin, of course, but it means take no one's word for it. And I think that's essentially what it means to be Western, right? Now, when we go and do business in countries that don't have a Western tradition of criticism, they are very often set up— and you mentioned this issue of uncertainty avoidance. There's a fantastic book that I think every international seller should read, which is Hofstede's—

Yeah, yeah, I was gonna ask you if you had read that. Yeah, Cultural Consequences.

somewhere, somewhere behind me here. So he talks about 5 dimensions of differences, and uncertainty avoidance is certainly one of them. I think the one that you hit first up in every country is the issue of power separation. Right. Hierarchies, structural hierarchies. So there are very strong male-female in most countries. So I started in Indonesia. It's a heavily Muslim country. Men and women do not mix. socially at all. They are very hierarchical in terms of position, corporate position, and it means that you cannot question in any way the person above. Now, for me, this is non-Western.

Oh, yeah.

The ability to not question is by definition not a Western way of doing business, you know. And our companies, if we're coming from countries like Australia, Europe, and the US, you know, we have the tradition of questioning because that's how we know we create new knowledge, right? knowledge by questioning. So we have to find ways to do business where at first glance it looks like you can't question authority. And, you know, when I started as a young salesperson, it was very difficult to even get a meeting at the level that you needed to get a meeting because all the decisions in a country like Russia or Indonesia or China, where I also, you know, I lived and worked in those kind of countries, all the decisions are made In a totally opaque way, very high in a structure.

Right.

You can't penetrate until you learn how to. And, you know, this is very different from doing business in Australia. I would say, by the way—

Or America. Or, you know, Australia, there are differences between Australians and Americans, but in terms of that, in terms of that openness, in terms of that trust, etc., they're very, very similar.

Well, we train, you know, in the US and Australia and Northern Europe, we train salespeople to go and kick down the door. And what we mean by that, of course, is get up these hierarchies.

And what I always say is situational trust, which basically means if you walk into somebody's office and you say, hi, I'm Zach, I'm the VP, you expect them to trust you Now you have a relationship. You gave them a business card, you have a relationship. Or you go into the store and the guy's wearing a blue shirt, you buy a stereo system from him, right? Whereas in most of these countries, there is a way to establish trust that you cannot circumvent. And no matter what your title is—

Yes. Now, I would say—

Sorry, I interrupted you there.

I love this topic, Zach. I would say that the US Because I've also spent quite a bit of time in the US. I lived in Austin, Texas, and spent a lot of time in Houston.

It's a beautiful place.

Yeah, I would say that the US is on an extreme that Americans in your audience should understand. Right. I think people from the US don't spend enough time building trust in business relationships, and they rely way too much on legal remedies. Right. So that doesn't happen in In any other country like it happens in the US.

Okay, I'm sorry, you raised the question. How many times have you seen somebody sue a partner internationally, Mike?

Zero. It's never happened.

Exactly. I always say to people, you spend 6 months putting together your distributor agreement and negotiating your distributor agreement. I said, do you— are you imagining that you're going to put a lawyer on a plane to Jakarta to sue somebody?

You're not going to win that.

Right. So why not just put together an agreement that covers the bare minimums and says, this is how we're going to separate. If we don't like each other, if we're not doing business, we're separating. But you're never going to sue somebody, right? In 30 years, I have never seen an American or any company put somebody on a plane to a different country to sue somebody, right? And I'm sorry. Yeah.

The contract doesn't even come out of the bloody drawer, right?

Right.

Look at the contract because we don't solve problems by going to the contract.

Exactly.

Crucial thing to understand in international business, your protection is not your contract, your protection is your relationship. Now, we know— sorry, go ahead.

Oh, I'm sorry, Mike, I'm just having so much fun with you. You know Marcus, uh, Cowsey, right?

Yes, I know Marcus well. Yes.

So he interviewed me once for his podcast and I said You know, there's only one way out of my network. It's in a box, right? Because I deal— the people I'm dealing with, I have people I've been dealing with for 30 years, and I might not do business with them through that time, but I can go back to them and call them. Because if you, you know, if you're in international sales and somebody can say, hey, Zach screwed me over 16 years ago, you're done, right? You— people have to be able to trust you. And people have to know that your work, you know, because it's all about trust. It isn't going to reach the lawyer, right? It's going to be— people are going to be talking about you in some bar in Düsseldorf or some coffee shop in Riyadh, and boom, you're out of business, right?

This is so true, Zach. And I also like to make a little comment here just for the benefit of your listeners. You and I are generalizing. We are generalizing big time.

Right.

And I think that there's a danger when you generalize that— and I'll tell you a little story here that caught me out. When I lived in Malaysia twice and I lived in— I worked in Malaysia in the oil and gas industry and also in the telecoms industry. And this is also a little funny story. And I worked in the— when I went to KL to live with my family of 3 boys, I was working in the oil and gas industry— sorry, in the telecoms industry for Nokia. So Nokia transferred me from Australia, as it happens, to KL. And there I met, because KL is an oil town, and I met my old boss from Schlumberger, and he was working for Halliburton then. And I met him like in the first week, just when I turned up. I happened to run into him in the coffee shop at the bottom of the Tower 2.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he said, Mike, I want you to come and work for me, because I'd worked for him in Russia, and he was from Ukraine— from Azerbaijan, this guy. Anyway, I said, well, you know, it'd be a little bit rude if I just quit Nokia one week after being transferred. I don't think I can do that, you know. But after 2 or 3 years, I did agree to go and work for him, and I went back into oil and gas. And the first— so I was the sales leader. I was running all the salespeople across Asia, so from China to India to, you know, and I was based in the Twin Towers. In fact, I moved up 4 floors from level 71 to 75. Kept my kids in the same school, had to change cars because of a different car policy, uh, but, you know, I had almost the identical job Moving from telecoms to oil and gas.

Right.

I had the same distributed sales team all over Asia. So anyway, what happens of course when you're the new sales manager is you do this review and you look at all the companies. And what I realized was the biggest oil company in Malaysia, which is Petronas, is in Tower 1, which I can see through my office 50 meters away. And we had no business with Petronas, right? Zero. I'm like, okay, I'm setting myself a little personal target here, Zach. I'm gonna I'm going to win business with Petronas because this is embarrassing. And so I'm kind of looking through the hierarchy and it's like, it's all Muslim. It's a Malay Muslim business and it's a hierarchy of men, but the head of exploration is a female. I'm going, how does this happen? You know, and how do I get to meet her? Because, you know, you can't really meet Muslim women one-on-one, right?

Right.

But I got to meet her in a couple of meetings. You know, we were trying hard and then, and I asked her, could we have a coffee, you know? And I was really surprised because she said yes. And so we went down and we had a coffee in one of the coffee shops in the basement of the Twin Towers. And I nearly blew that meeting. I nearly blew it. I was so scared. Firstly, I was scared that she wasn't chaperoned and we were meeting kind of one-on-one. And, you know, we're sort of out in public. And I was really scared to— I was really scared to run the meeting right. And I was way too formal in my meeting.

Hmm.

And I had these kind of canned questions.

Right.

I was asking these questions and she was— and she had a problem. And the problem was they were failing in Vietnam. They had a drilling program in Vietnam and they were drilling all dry holes and they'd spent hundreds of millions of dollars there. And she said to me, Mike, you know, what do you know? What does Halliburton know about exploring for oil in volcanics? You know, which is the type of rock they were in. And I launched into this stupid salesperson, we're brilliant at volcanics, right? You know, I just I forgot the question, like, what's your problem with volcanics? You know, I forgot to go deep on that question and I just saved it right at the end. I thought, oh my God, you know, I forgot my sales technique. And I went back and I said, look, you know, can you tell me really what's going on for you there? And I found out that she was probably going to lose her job if she didn't solve this problem.

Right.

And she laid it out, you know, like a normal person And this is why I say we must be careful about generalizing, because people are people. And she was concerned about, you know, being the first lady exploration manager, and could she prove that she knew what she was doing. And I nearly blew the exploration discussion with that.

Well, the way I— you know, you're somebody I can talk to about this, right? Remember 20, 30 years ago when you discover something like Disc or the Enneagram or something like that. And you're thinking, oh, he's a Type 6. I know exactly how to deal with a Type 6, right? And it's like that. You could say, well, okay, I'm dealing with a Greek guy. I'm dealing, you know, do you go back to the Greek example? I'm dealing with a 50-year-old Greek man. I know what he's going to be like. And then you realize, okay, this guy actually grew up in Texas and only moved to as an adult and he's totally different. Or for some other reason, he just doesn't fit. But It gives you a framework to start, you know, and that's how you have— that's the way I look at it is you're basically, you're trying to use all the information you possibly can. And I think if you take like Hofstetter's book is great. There's another one by a woman named Erin called— I don't remember the name of it, but, but she also does it. It's a similar book with, with slightly different parameters on culture. And when you take those things, you can actually look and say, well, what's actually different between Brazilians and Colombians? What's different between Germans and Greeks? What's different between, you know, and then you take a look at and you say, okay, these are 2 or 3 things I got to keep my eye open for. And it can be very, very helpful. You know.

That's right. It's, you know, if I had tried to shake her hand or, you know, leaned in too close.

Right.

Some cultures we do, we like to talk with our faces close to them. This would have been an absolute cultural faux pas. So I knew enough not to do that. But, and I was very nervous about that meeting just because I was having the meeting. I was nervous about that meeting.

I can get that. Yeah, I can understand.

I got myself in the process, you know, but really people are people and, and people are creative in wonderful ways from every country, you know. And this sort of desire to solve problems and do deals, this is absolutely uniform across the whole planet. You know, so people want to make creative deals. They want to do business. They want to—

And they have problems and they need help solving those problems, right? That's what salespeople do, right? There you go. So I want to skip to another subject as much as I'm enjoying this. And like, I think I said to you like a year or so ago on a message, we got to get together for a beer sometime when we're both in the same country. So this is the next best thing.

Yeah.

But you teach storytelling right now.

Yes.

And so one thing that I've found, because— and I don't know if this is how you got into it, if you— but what I found was I was selling very technically difficult products. And in a lot of places, the sales force were very technical people, engineers, and helping teach them to tell stories Because they would come in and they'd say, yes, we are, we make this out of 20-gauge steel and it's the best possible. And I'd be like, no, no, don't do that. Right. But that was where they defaulted to. And I used to do these workshops to teach people to tell stories. And I, what I find, found a lot of pride in that because you'd get these guys who were real, real engineering types, very, very square. And by the third day, they would be telling these stories that would make you cry. And they, you know, and using those stories to engage the customer. And it was really cool. So maybe talk a little bit about how you got into the storytelling. Not, not, I know you've been doing this for a while and you might touch on that, but how you really got into the point where you're doing this as a, as a business, right? Teaching people to tell stories in sales.

Yeah, look, like lots of things, I'm a slow learner, Zach, and it took me a while to notice. You know, it's like the goldfish not noticing it's in the ocean, right? It took me a while to notice that it's the stories that do the work in sales conversations.

That's a great sentence, by the way. Yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way, but that's true. They're like doing the heavy lifting.

Yeah, they do the heavy lifting. And so I'll tell you, I'll try to keep this a little bit shorter, but when I was running marketing team out of Europe for our oil and gas software business, and I had the problem of organizing— I had a 1-hour time slot for a user forum. We had about 600 or 400, I think, of our customers in Prague in the Czech Republic, and might have been called Czechoslovakia then, I'm not sure. And so I had 1 hour, and like, 1 hour is a long time, and And we had all this software and I'm like, I'm not going to do a software demo for 1 hour. Like, that's going to be boring as anything. And so what I did was I wrote a play too. And my pre-sales guys hated me for this. Like, guys, I've got this idea. We're going to do a play and you guys are all going to play parts in this play. And this is the scenario because this scenario is brilliant. You can like, you know, forget it. But anyway, we did it and I got them up on screen and we had these big computer displays behind them and they were working through a problem. They were working through an oil and gas problem with multi-disciplines— geologists, geophysicists, and all this sort of thing— and they were solving this problem in real time in a play and the audience just got totally sucked into it. And at the end of this—

I can imagine. Yeah.

Yeah, but what was really interesting, we stopped the presentation and we said, well, any questions? Right? And the questions like went for an hour and they all They stayed in role to answer the questions, right? How they're solving this problem, right? And that was when I kind of realized like, holy shit, this is amazing, you know?

It's powerful stuff, right?

It's totally powerful, but you can't— like, it's also an enormous amount of work to put that together. And then I started noticing that you could kind of condense these stories down. And where I saw it first really do work was when I first went to Russia. That was in Moscow in 2000. And Schlumberger has an interesting history in Russia. Schlumberger started in the late 1920s.

That was a good— that was an interesting time to be in Russia. That was the Wild West.

Vladimir Putin had just been made the president.

Did you have like 5 security guards in your lobby?

No, we didn't have security guards, but it was, I can tell you, wild. It was wild. The guy that lived next to me was the head of BP, and he had an explosive expert with a sniffer dog go around his house every morning to be picked up with his car. But anyway, I was telling the story of Schlumberger in Russia as part of my introduction because, you know, at that time Russia would have been like one of the few places in the world that didn't know Schlumberger. Schlumberger is a famous company in the oil and gas industry. But Schlumberger was started in the late '20s by 2 French brothers. They invented a technique for working out where the oil is in an oil well using electric probes.

Mm-hmm.

And that's like the most useful thing. Like, is there or is there not oil in this oil well and where is it? Like, if you can answer that question, this is a multi, probably trillion-dollar invention now, right? Because it made Schlumberger, and Schlumberger is a, you know, $100 billion a year business. So anyway, in the 1930s, as an entrepreneurial company, the first country in the world that got it and accepted Schlumberger was Soviet Union. So they were all over the Soviet Union with this newfangled equipment that could tell you where oil was. The Russians were all over it, you know, very smart people as we know. And then Stalin nationalized them, stole all the equipment, executed our country manager, and kicked us out of the country, right? So this is what we call bad history in the country, right?

A little, little bit, yeah.

Yeah, a little bit, right? Fast forward to the '90s and Schlumberger's got to make this not easy business decision. Do we go back into Russia, right? And the strategy guys bring the business case to the CEO, it was Ewan Baird at the time, and they said, essentially, how much money are you willing to blow on this re-entry project? And he goes, $200 million, I'm willing to lose $200 million. So they decide to focus on 2 of the newly privatized Russian oil companies because you can't really work with the Russian government.

Right.

You certainly couldn't at that time because that's like a sort of national money laundering scheme. 2 of the companies. These companies don't exist anymore, but we doubled their production in 18 months. We brought in technical experts. The Russian oil industry was like a technological backwater really at that time compared to everybody everywhere else in the world.

Right.

It had been a closed system and we doubled their production. So I'm telling this story. I'm telling this story to these potential clients about the history of Schlumberger in Russia and how we've come back and we're doubling the production. And man, this Then I start hearing that same story coming back from another client. Like, this story is traveling, right? This story is doing business because what it says is a lot of— you infer a lot of things about it. And this is the power of stories. You infer—

Oh yeah, yeah.

This is an international business. It's innovative. It's going to make you rich. We're all over the world, you know. So, you know, I'm telling this story and that's when it kind of twigged to me that you could be deliberate about your stories. And it's the last— right, what story do I tell when I go into this meeting? Right, right. You start thinking that way, it totally changes your conversation. I wrote 7 Stories, which is 7 stories every salesperson must tell.

Yeah, that— so I gotta say that I read that, and I've read about 4 books. I mean, you obviously didn't invent the concept of telling stories, right, for sales. So I've read about 4 books by people I know, and that was— and this is what I said to you also at the time— that was the best book on storytelling for sales that I've read. Because again, I like the word intent you used. I think, Jesus, not to knock anybody else, but a lot of the other ones were sort of like, well, I sell and I tell stories and it sort of worked out pretty good for me. But it's all about the intent of building that story to— so the way I like to say, and I always say, look, the stories are like the vessels, the trucks that are carrying— you have a piece of messaging that you want to deliver to the customer.

Yes.

You can trust me because This company is giant and we're— you can trust our company, right? And I— but I can't just say that to them. I put it on a story and I deliver it, right? Our product is reliable, sure, but I don't— I want to tell a story about that, right? And deliver it, right? Etc., you know? And that's what I got from your book is the intent.

That's exactly right. And, you know, sitting behind me, you know, most of your people are going to be listening. Behind me, you can see on the video, is a great big bookshelf of sales training books mostly.

Right.

Now those books, sales training books, you know, we teach sales training completely wrong in my opinion. You know, we have forever focused on question, answer, question, answer. And look, if you're working in the US and we already said, look, the US is the sort of transactional end of, you know, we're going to do a deal. Answer this question. Tell me, is this your situation? Yes, no. What's your challenge? Yes, no. You need this. Here's the solution. Right. So question-answer can work in your fast-paced, we'll sue you if it doesn't work out United States business model. Question-answer does not work anywhere else in the world because they are not answering your questions until—

Right. Until they trust you. And that's the thing. You go into Nigeria to the Minister of Health and you say, So tell me, you know, what's the biggest failures with your budget next year?

Fail.

Yeah, that doesn't work. But you could do that. You could go to Washington and say, I'm the vice president of a company you've never heard of. I have nice shoes. Tell me about this. And he will. He'll trust you based on the fact that you give him a business card that says VP and you have a pair of nice shoes on, right? But nowhere else in the world does that happen.

Yeah, it doesn't happen. It doesn't even happen in Australia, actually. So, right, so it doesn't happen. And you identified the other problem, which is the technical— so I think salespeople fall into 2 categories of problems with their sales conversation. Yeah, my shortline title of what I do is helping salespeople say the right thing.

Right.

The first category is question-answer. I can ask this question, you give me the answer. You know, that is not the way to learn how to have a conversation. And the second problem is technobabble. You know, we've got the gigatron megawatt whatever thingo gadget. Yep. Echo, echo, echo. Your client doesn't understand you. They have no idea what you're talking about. They're going to nod politely.

In fact, even if they do understand you, you are boring the hell out of them. Yeah, but most probably they don't. Yeah.

The simplest way to understand what a story is, is context, problem, solution. Stories are about problem solving, and what technobabble does is says, here's the solution, here's the solution, out of context and out of the problem context. When I put that into a story, it's now in context, and the client wants to know, oh, how do we solve that problem? That's interesting. And, oh, you solve it that way.

That's Can I, can I, can I add to that, Mike? Is also, I think, I always say everybody has 25 problems on their head, 100 problems on their head. A story, I always say what you want to do is isolate and exaggerate the problem that you solve, right?

Yeah.

And a story can do that because you go in and this guy is thinking about 25 problems and you say, oh yeah, you know, somebody very much like you had this problem and his foot fell off. Isn't that horrible? And he goes, oh crap, I didn't even think of that. Wow, this could get worse right now. I'm exaggerating, obviously, but that's what the story does is 10 minutes ago he might have been thinking, well, this is one of 25 problems and it's— I don't know which one I'm going to solve first. If you tell him the right story, he's going, huh, yeah, maybe I really do have to solve this problem. You know, more quickly, right?

Absolutely. And stories, the heart, the heart of a story, the center of the story, which is the problem, has a surprise in it. And we listen carefully when there's a problem with a surprising solution. And so stories, stories get attention like nothing else does. There's a reason people binge-watch Netflix, because, you know, at the end of Netflix it goes 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and you go, whoa, what's What's going to happen next? I've got to keep watching the next one. Stories just grab our attention. So, you know, my mission to the world is to change the way we teach salespeople. I don't want to teach them that question-answer at all. I want to teach them how to tell a story so they can get a story. The ideal business meeting is, Zach, here's my story.

I love that. Tell a story so you can get a story. Correct.

If I tell you something about a story which might Like the Schlumberger story I told you, right? You should trust us. And then I go, well, tell me, Zach, tell me about your company and how you got into your company. And because I've just told a story, there's a human convention, and this definitely crosses all borders, and the convention— someone tells us a story, we want to tell one back.

Yeah, and because you know what, this goes back to us sitting around the campfire, you know, quarter of a million years ago, right? So we are running a little—

I'm not as old as you, Zach.

But we're running a little tight now. And I want to go on to one, because again, you're one of the few people I can talk about— to about this. Let's talk about how things have changed since you, you know, you got out of college and started your first job. And now you're in the 21st century. And isn't that wild, right?

Well, I've had some really interesting experiences going back to countries that I worked and lived in 20, 30 years ago. So I lived in China in 1988 for a year.

Oh yeah, yeah.

So 1988, everybody was riding bicycles. There were very few cars. Everyone wore a military uniform.

Right. And the little lunchboxes, right? Everybody was taking—

Pure communism. Now, whatever China is today, it is not communism. You have not experienced communism if you don't know what real communism is like.

Right.

Communism, everybody gets paid exactly the same wage. So everyone was on $30 a month. No one was incentivized to do any work for anything, and the country didn't work. And I have lots of stories about it. But I got to go back to China when I was working for Halliburton in 2012.

Now, no different— A little different.

No country has changed like China. Like, if I go back to Jakarta 20 years later or 30 years later, or Bangkok, I can still recognize the city.

It's changed, but you could recognize it exactly.

Yeah. You cannot recognize how China has changed. Where I lived, which was red brick, 2-story, you know, looked like Victorian England, was now 4-lane motorways that you could eat your lunch off, high-rise glass towers, and everyone driving BMWs. I mean, This is not a small change. This is like a massive change.

Oh, yeah, yeah. And so much disposable income. Yeah.

Correct. But so that's, you know, you see these changes. But when I also got to go back to Indonesia, back to Sumatra, where I first started, and I stayed in a hotel that was being used by Schlumberger for their trainee engineers. So I was a trainee engineer in the mid-'80s. Right. And it was all guys. And sitting at breakfast was 7 or 8 Chinese girls in their brand new blue, absolutely no oil stain on it uniforms. It was day 1 for these girls, right? So, you know, that's an industry that's, you know, it's just changed out of sight. And we talked a little bit about, you know, what is Western thinking? And Western thinking is being able to criticize. The definition of Western thinking is a tradition of criticism. You're able to criticize.

Right.

And, you know, these are people learning that you can criticize. And this is my hope for the world, actually, is that every culture can get the benefit of being able to criticize. And you can't criticize in lots of cultures. So yeah, it's changed out of sight, but a lot of things don't change. These hierarchies, these status hierarchies, who's really in charge and who makes decisions, decision-making I don't think they've changed that much, to be honest.

Did you ever work in India, Mike?

I, look, I've worked in India across 2 industries, so telecoms and oil and gas, but I never lived in India. I've probably spent cumulative months there. I've been in far northeast Assam and various parts of India.

So I was gonna say there, the caste system. So I went to India first 25, a little bit more than 25 years ago. And the caste system has changed quite— first of all, there's a lot, again, a lot more money now. It hasn't changed as much as China, but you do see a big change in the caste system and how people relate to that. And there are more people whose grandfather was, you know, a street cleaner or, you know, something simple in higher positions. Now, which, yeah, so I like to think there is some change going on with that and it's really developing. But yeah, it's, it's hard to break some of those patterns, right?

Yeah, India has— I'll be open about this, Zach. India has a serious issue with management and leadership. And, and it's historically based. It's historically based that these, these hierarchies of status are entrenched at multiple levels. So they're entrenched from the caste system, which whilst it's now illegal in India, everybody knows what caste they came from. And it's not an accident that it's Brahmin caste at the top of most businesses still. It's also very strongly affected by what religion you come from, and you can tell what religion people are from by just their name and looking at them.

And you can tell— an Indian can tell their religion, their caste, a lot of things just from somebody's name and looking at somebody else. And there's also skin color, right? There's a lot of what we would consider racism in America based on skin tone.

Yeah. Yes. So you get a lot of, you know, really poor management. I'll give you an example of really poor management that is changing. But I went to meet one of the big— the head of— this is in oil and gas— but I went to meet a very senior manager for one of the big conglomerate Indian companies. And you can probably—

I know what you mean.

You know these companies. And this was a fancy office south of Mumbai, beautiful glass door, modern office, right?

Okay. So if it was in South Mumbai, I actually know who you're talking about. But okay. Yeah.

Well, okay. But you know, it's— So I met this guy and we had a great conversation, him, me, and my local Indian country manager. We talked for about an hour and he said, Mike, you know, it's great that you're here. We don't often get, you know, people with your knowledge. We're talking quite technically, actually. Would you mind giving a little presentation to our technical team here? You know, we've got about 40 highly technical people, geologists, geophysicists, this kind of thing. I said, yeah, sure. No problem at all. You know, he said, good. And he stood up. And he opened this door beside his office, and in the door next to us, and had been for the previous hour, was his entire technical team waiting.

Waiting, right.

Waiting to give a presentation. I thought, oh my God. And the first question I asked is, how long you guys been waiting for? 60 minutes. So this is an example of— oh yeah, oh yeah. And, and it's back to this, I'm in charge and you guys are just going to wait there, right?

And yep. I know. Yep. Definitely. Definitely. Well, this has been a blast, Mike. I could go on forever, but eventually people will just tune out because they'll get a little tired of this. But I'm having a lot of fun. I really, really appreciate your coming on to talk to me. And—

Let me summarize just quickly.

Oh, please do. Yeah.

I would love to summarize. You know, we've talked about general generalizations. The world's changing quickly. Use the generalizations as a little framework to try to orient yourself. But people are people, you know. Remember my Muslim lady story, you know. People—

Yep, that's, that's a great story. And I think that's really a very, very powerful message because you're all— you know, I have, you know, and it's sort of a cliché in America, you say, well, you know, I have really good friends from all over. But I do, you know, and some of the best people I've worked with have really come from very, very simple circumstances from halfway around the world. And a generation ago, there would be no way we ever possibly could have met. But now with technology and the way things work, you know, we've intersected and we've worked together and made new friends. So yeah, it's very important. I think that's a really powerful Powerful message, Mike. Thanks.

And the final message is ditch, ditch the question-answer sales training technique and learn how to tell and share stories. Get into story exchanges with your clients.

And I can tell you, Mike, like half of my friends are listening to this and saying, what's he saying? What's he saying? That's how I make my living.

So you're not in Kansas anymore, my friend.

I know, but I happen to have a lot of sales training friends and everybody has different different ways of doing things. But I agree with the idea that stories are an incredibly, incredibly powerful point. I'll throw out something just unrelated to this, but I always say the best way to establish your value with the customer, in my opinion, right, is actually to ask the right question. So I always say the questions aren't necessarily to You don't use the questions the way they're traditionally used. But if I ask you a question that relates to your problem in a way that nobody else has ever asked you before, no other vendor has ever asked you before, your appreciation of my knowledge suddenly goes up, right? That's my belief. So it's sort of like, I think using stories and using questions and using humor all have their places. have to understand how to use them. But I think you're exactly right. The whole idea of, well, this is the structure, I'm going to ask 12 questions and he's going to answer me, you got to throw that out the window.

If I tell a client, an international client, a story about how my company helped another client like them solve a problem, if I throw a story like that out and then I will ask a question, but it's not a question you find in any of these books behind me. And the question is, So enough about them. What's going on? What's going on with you? Right. They tell me a story about what's happening. Oh yeah. Yeah. And they open up and here's what's going on. Right. So it's not— the questions are not so much, tell me how many, what's your challenge, what's keeping you up at night. The questions are, you know, tell me, when did that happen? What happened next? Uh-huh. Go on.

And I think, I think you're adding, you're giving me something to add to my technique because I'll probably get a better answer if he is lubricated to tell a better story. So that's a really good point, Mike.

Well, the story that you tell conditions the type of story you're going to get back. If I tell a story, right, right, right, of ours that had this problem, right, you have directed their attention to tell me a story back about something like that. So you're getting from them a rich, detailed story of what's gone wrong at their place.

Right. Yeah.

You don't have to ask them what's gone wrong here. They just do that naturally. And so it's a more sophisticated way to go deeper in discovery is to think, I'm not here to get answers to my questions. I'm here to hear stories about how things are in their business.

That's a very good point.

I'll do that by exchanging stories.

Right.

It's a very different way to think about a conversation. I mean, you and I have been doing this now. We just—

That's exactly what we've been doing. Exactly. Yeah. Well, thanks a lot for your time, Mike. I'm going to cut off because again, we're running over a little bit over an hour now. And this was a blast. I'm almost feeling that I'm just going to shut down the podcast after one episode because it's never going to get any better than this. But I just—

You can always bring me back. You know what podcasts are like.

I might just definitely have you back. So this has been a lot of fun. Thank you very much. So just everybody again, could you hold up your book one second again, Mike? There you go. Mike Adams, 7 Stories. And if you take a look on the internet or on LinkedIn, you can find his company and he does trainings. And you don't just do trainings in Australia, you do trainings all over the world at this point, right?

All over the world. And we do them virtually these days because everyone's figured out how to do virtual.

Exactly. All right. Thanks a lot, Mike.

Good on you, Zach.