And I think if all you're focused on is what the score is going to
be at the end of the game, at the end of the year,
you're gonna miss the stuff that really matters in getting you there. You're listening
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Hello, and welcome to the Audible Ready Sales Podcast. I'm Rachel clap
Miller. Today we are going to talk about leading with purpose. No matter
the size of your team, it's important you're leading in a way that motivates
action. Brian Wallace joins me for this conversation. Hi Brian, Hi Rachel,
how are you. I'm doing great. I'm ready for this conversation.
And let's just kind of start Brian, as we do high level overview,
what do we mean when we say leading with purpose? Well, let me
throw something at you that maybe you weren't expecting because it just popped into my
head as you kicked this off, okay, which is there are only three
outcomes when you leave this world as a leader, right, You're going to
be remembered for what you did for people, You're going to be remembered for
what you did to them, or you're simply going to be forgotten. So
I firmly believe that there are very few people in this world who would would
want to be remembered in any other way than having being remembered for what they
did for people. And that's what they mean by leading with purpose. It's
getting to an outcome where you are remembered for how you helped people develop themselves
in their career and the outcomes that you were able to help them achieve as
a result. That's what I mean awesome. And I know sometimes we talk
about active consensus building, active hapences as it relates to leading with purpose.
How does that play in here? Well, I think it place into the
fact that you've got to be thinking about. You know, it's not the
finish line, it's how are we going to get to the finish line?
Right? And I think if all you're focused on is what the score is
going to be at the end of the game, at the end of the
year, you're going to miss the stuff that really matters in getting you there.
And so active consensus is about getting everybody to row in the same direction
and play the role that they need to play in the way that they need
to play it, and having the skills to do that really effectively. And
I know you know this, like, this is all about how do I
drive that because your other option is for people to just go do their own
thing? Yeah, and that typically rarely doesn't get us anywhere, right,
that's leading with a lack of purpose. Yeah, Okay, So I know
we break these down into a couple areas, Brian, So let's kind of
go through that as we structure this conversation today. The first is the why.
Let's talk about giving our teams why. We talk about this a lot.
I think people think they do this, but they don't talk about how
we provide the why. Yeah. I think people have a tendency to start
with the what. This is what we're going to go do, right,
or you know a good example is this is what you need to go do
to advance this opportunity. Right. We're always talking in the what, and
the why is the thing that matters more than anything, and I can't say
it any better than the old Simon Senek Ted talk start with why eighteen minutes
of the best Ted talk I've ever seen. And you know he talks about
how the human brain reacts to why more than any other thing, and that
if you can get people to attach to a why that matters for them,
you've got a much higher chance of them being willing to act. So that's
what matters. And you got to you got to attach the why to them,
right. So, you know, we work with sales organizations all the
time. You've got leaders who have account executives, leaders who have account managers,
and somebody else has customer success or solutions, consultants, etcetera. The
why for everybody's different, right, So you got to you got to attest
the thing that they're going to care about. And that's where it starts.
Nothing else matters if you can't give me a really effective why should I be
thinking this way? Why should I consider doing what we're about to do?
Those kinds and by the way, that applies to the customer conversation. People
make this mistake all the time. Hey, Rachel, can you introduce me
to so and so? And you're on your team, and we wonder why
people are like, oh no, you don't need to meet them right now.
You have to give her a why? Why should she right? What's
in it for her? So that's that's why the why matters so much.
Really good point because so often I think we feel like we have communicated the
why, but we have to remember that the why is different for whom we're
talking to, right right, for different priorities. Looks a good thing to
keep in mind. Okay, let's shift to the how. How is often
a misstep. We might tell people the what, but we miss the details
behind it. They don't have the how how they're supposed to go do do
that? So how can we be better communicating the how? You know?
It's funny, I'm having a flashback to when I got my first laptop.
I remember my company brought everybody, every seller in the country, and we
had a lot of salespeople on nationally and worldwide, into these conference rooms and
there were these beautiful laptops sitting there, and nobody else had had a laptop
before, right, They laptops were kind of new, and they gave us
about a forty five minute course on how to turn the laptop on. I
mean, but the laptop had had the initial versions of PowerPoint and Excel and
Word and other things most of us have never had ever really ever used before.
Maybe we'd used a little bit of Word on a desktop somewhere and all
the way. But somebody woke up eighteen months later said, how come we're
not getting the productivity increase out of our people that everybody promised when we bought
these laptops. Nobody showed us how to do it. Like it's like here
you go, you know, And so the how is like the thing that
matters more than anything after you get past the why, because if somebody isn't
going to give me the skills, isn't going to, you know, tell
me what good looks like, and then show me what good looks like,
and then someone's going to be there to watch me do it and then give
me feedback. Like it's kind of funny. People talk about going to get
golf lessons all the time. Everybody wants to go spend time with the pro
on the range because the pro will watch you, right, and then they'll
tell you some things, then they'll show you some things, and then they'll
watch you do it, and they'll give you some feedback. There's this great
loop that is happening, you know, a week over week over week,
but nobody wants to do it in this type of environment. This is as
much of a skill as anything else. So if you would agree with that
hypothesis, that means somebody's got to be willing to coach, right, don't
The coach doesn't have to be the expert or the greatest player in the history
of the game. But the coach has got to be able to help me
break this thing down and understand its pieces parts and then help me put it
back together in a way that builds repeatable skill. So that's why the how
it's so important we talk a lot about that, especially around medic is a
great example. You medic provides you the gaps in your deals. You can
be in with a rep and say, okay, well you don't have the
economic buyer or you have an aligned with the economic buyer, go do that.
Well, right, how is a big part of fire. Yeah,
if you stop right I love that. If you stop right there with you
need to go find the economic buyers. The classic example of somebody screaming at
the scoreboard. You know, I can look at the scoreboard and know whether
we're winning or losing. Right, it's the how that's the hard part,
right. And here's the other thing about the how. If you are as
a leader willing to become a great coach, and you spend time with me
on the example you just threw out there about the economic buyer, and you
help me think through how are we going to get access to that person?
What are we going to do to be effective when we get that access those
kinds of things. The halo effect is literally compounding interest, right, because
you've just given me a skill that now I take to every other conversation than
I have around that topic, not just this conversation. So you're elevating my
game to make me that much more effective when you and I aren't in the
room, but I have another economic buyer thing going on in another deal.
That's the other reason this how thing is so important. That's good, that's
good. I wanted to bring in another concept that we quite often talk about
it as it relates to leading, and that's it called leading from the front.
Accountability critical opponent to making this work. How do we make sure that
we're leading from the front, holding ourselves accountable? Yeah, it's okay.
It starts with the why and the how. I believe. I mean,
you can you can hold people accountable without the why and the how. Good
luck, they're all going to quit. They're gonna hate you. I mean,
that's what happens. Right, you are viewed as a really ugly dictator.
That's not quite the adjective I was looking for, but I wasn't grabbing
it. I'd prefer to be viewed as a benevolent dictator because the reality is,
if you're a leader, there are times when you have to be a
dictator. I would prefer people remember me as more of a benevolent one.
And a benevolent dictator is someone who not only knows when to be benevolent,
when to be a dictator, but also understands that without the why and the
how, people are not going to follow from long. But if you have
the if you're good at the why and the how, when you do need
to dictate some things, you're going to be in a much better position to
get buy in and it will be easier for you to identify your cynics.
Now here's what we mean by whole people accountable. What it means is when
you see a cynic you act. I've given you the why, I've given
you the how. It's okay if you don't want to do this, it
just means you don't get to sell for me. That's all right, and
it's it's not a value judgment, but it's you know, there's a reason
the greatest organizations in every endeavor in life have these long track records of being
great organizations. And one of the reasons is because once they set the standard
with the how, the why, and the how, they hold everybody accountable,
not just certain people. That's the key to this, and that's how
you get in a whole organization buying in. That's good. I think,
you know, I meant this before. I think sometimes people who are leading
feel like they're doing this. They're like, I'm giving the why and I'm
giving the how. But in reality and maybe not you know, doing what
it's supposed to. Maybe they're not going far enough. They may think they're
doing it, but they really aren't. And I know, Brian, you
work with a lot of great leaders out there, a lot of leaders who
might be struggling. What mistakes do you see most often in the companies that
you work with are out in these points over your career. What do you
think are the mistakes? Mostly case, Yeah, so let's review a couple
we kind of already hit on, and then I'm going to go someplace else.
One is to your point, they think they're doing it, but they're
really not. Like they're giving some you know, classic example, Hey,
we're going to waunch salesforce dot com. And the reason we're going to do
that, it comes to big why is because the company wants a better view
of all the data on our deals. Well, that's good for the company.
What's the why for me? Like so that's just a classic example,
Like, well, the why for me should be when you do that,
we are going to be in a better position to get in a room and
talk about live opportunities and help you move them forward, because we're never going
to ask you to put that information someplace else, and we're actually all going
to read it before we get in a room, so we can show up
at a point of view to help you advance a deal, not read us
the newspaper. I'm going to help you win more deals because of how I'm
going to come to talk to you and with you about those deals. There's
an example, like, there's a big difference in that. Right. The
other thing they do is they don't do a very good job of coaching.
They might show people what good looks like. But here's the problem with only
showing people. If you don't tell people what good looks like, like you
got to dissect stuff. Here's what a great golf swing consists of. There's
twelve different things, and we're going to work on them one at a time,
or we can work on these two together. Then I show you.
So so I'm like, I've got the understanding of not just what it'd be
like watching Michael Phelps swim the butterfly and then jumping in the pool and expect
to be able to do it just like him. Right, I mean,
that's not how this works. So you gotta help me understand. You got
to tell me what's involved in this skill that we're about to develop or thing
we're about to do. You got to then show me. And then where
a lot of organizations ball down is they show people and I'm like, there
you go, you're good. It's like when we got our laptop, here
you go, you're good. Somebody's got to then be involved in the development
in terms of watching me or observing me do this thing so that they can
then give me constructive feedback that I can use to continuously improve. That's the
second thing they don't The third thing they don't do is they don't hold people
accountable. They let people off the hook. And here are the two groups
they always let off the hook. They let their high skill, low will
people off the hook because we get addicted to that person's performance, which sends
a message to the rest of the company, which is not good by the
way. And then the other people they let the hook are their leaders.
I see this all the time. You know, you go into you go
into an engagement, and what a couple of leaders are constantly getting up and
leaving the room. And I try to tell people on the front end,
if you're leaving the room, guess who else they can leave the room.
If you're checked out, guess who else is checking out. So those are
the big three mistakes that in terms of the three topics we just covered.
Here's the fourth mistake. People sit in a chair too long when they shouldn't
it. And what I mean by that is, if you're trying to do
this effectively and you are surrounded by other leaders who will not. You've probably
got a decision to make, which is am I going to continue to fight
this fight? Or am I maybe going to take my talents someplace else?
And that's just a reality. Sometimes you're surrounded by others who don't want to
do this, don't see the value in doing this for the organization or for
themselves or for their people. And that's okay. I'm not making a value
judgment. I'm just suggesting, do you really want to be surrounded by that?
Like, there's the old adage that you are a product of the three
to five people that you spend the most people, most most time went.
So that's my take on it. Awesome. Well, quite often I ask
for a final thought at the end of the is these podcasts, and I'm
I will give you one. Well, I wonder if it goes back to
how you started, I will give you one. I have been sent here
on a mission on behalf of your people. I have self appointed myself recently
as the defender of the individual contributor. And all I mean by that I
say that song and cheek, but all I mean by that is I'm begging
you on behalf of your people to be the kind of leader that will be
remembered for what you did for them, not what you did too them.
And this is an example of doing four not doing two. That's my final
point. Great, thank you Brian, my pleasure right, and thank you
to all of you for listening to the Audible Ready Sales Podcast. At Force
Management, we're focused on transforming sales organizations into elite teams. Are proven methodologies,
deliver programs that build company alignment and fuel repeatable revenue growth. Give your
teams the ability to execute the growth strategy at the point of sale. Our
strength is our experience. The proof is in our results. Let's get started.
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