by Nancy Calabrese | May 23, 2024 | Podcast
About Isabelle Fortin: Isabelle Fortin is a standout mindset facilitator, entrepreneur, and public speaker. Her journey is marked by determination and creativity. Through Izzy Fortin Coaching, she uses her experiences and insights to help others grow professionally and personally. Isabelle faced a significant challenge when she was just five years old: she lost her mother. Being the youngest of three siblings, she had to learn how to be strong and resilient early on, and these qualities have guided her throughout her life. Isabelle’s career path is wide-ranging and impressive. She served in the Canadian Air Force, an experience that taught her discipline and structure. Afterward, she spent 23 years as a devoted massage therapist, improving her ability to heal and care for others. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Isabelle.
In this episode, Nancy and Isabelle discuss the following:
- Isabelle’s transition from military to sales
- Definition of a rebel and the importance of rebels in sales
- Strategy: “Make friends before you make clients.”
- Value of honesty and authenticity in sales
- Aligning company culture with sales team needs
- Impact of military experience on sales approach
- Turning rebellious salespeople into rock stars
Key Takeaways:
- You can’t go against who you are
- Make friends before you make clients
- If you give the rebels the tools that they need, they will become rock stars
- Always quit a toxic relationship
“I think that most sales rebels are extremely people-oriented. They’re extremely community- and relationship-minded. And it is truly for them about cultivating relationships more than anything else. They make friends before they make clients. Of course, you know, the business that you are in has to give you that opportunity. I mean, if you’re a salesperson in a store, maybe, you know, that’s a little bit less, especially if it’s a chain store, it’s a little bit less of that. But even then, how many great people do we find or quite the opposite? You go to a store, and the person, you know, won’t look at you, engage with you, or ask anything. Well, we are less likely to go back, right? So, I think that that’s in their nature—to build relationships—and it is about selling who they are first.” – ISABELLE
“I believe that, of anybody, but especially when it comes to salespeople, thrive when the culture of the company that they work for understands that they cannot be treated like every other employee because they are different. And I find that you know, sales managers—only 6% of them get training in management. And yeah, only 6%. The stats are scary. Very often, I believe that either the company took their top salesman and decided to make them the manager, or worse yet, they took somebody from another department and decided, “Hey, you’re a good manager. So, you can now lead the sales team.” Sales is a different kind of species. And if you treat them the same as everybody else, they’re going to underperform, and they’re going to look for a job very quickly. And I think that that is the biggest mistake that most companies do—is deal with their salespeople the “wrong” way.” – ISABELLE
“The connection that I brought to my personal life from the military was you can work well with somebody you don’t like and don’t need to. I hear coaches say that very often—find the commonality, find, you know, if that person likes ballet or bowling or whatever, and you like that too, then you know, that’s something to base the relationship on. And I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. Sometimes, the commonality is that you’re both humans living on this planet. So, you don’t have to share a passion with somebody to get along with them. And that’s where I got that from the military because in service, you literally, like a firefighter the same way. Police officers are the same way. You don’t have to like someone. You need to recognize that that person is doing their best with the hand they’ve been dealt. And so that’s what I bring from my military career to my consulting company now.” – ISABELLE
Connect with Isabelle Fortin:
Try Our Proven, 3-Step System, Guaranteeing Accountability and Transparency that Drives RESULTS by clicking on this link: https://oneofakindsales.com/call-center-in-a-box/
Connect with Nancy Calabrese:
Voiceover: You’re listening to The Conversational Selling Podcast with Nancy Calabrese.
Nancy Calabrese: Hi, it’s Nancy Calabrese, and it’s time again for Conversational selling – the podcast where sales leaders and business experts share what’s going on in sales and marketing today and it always starts with the human conversation. Today we’re speaking with Isabelle Fortin, owner of Rebel Sales Consulting and speaking at Izzy Fortin Coaching. Isabelle spent 10 years in the military. When she was putting her life into someone else’s hands, she learned to respect others despite their differences. And after the military, she entered into the world of sales, but she was, in a word, unmanageable. Then she created her own coaching company focused on mindset, managed her own sales force using her rebel sales strategies. She knows how to deal with rebels because she is one. Welcome to the show, Isabelle. So happy to have you on.
Isabelle Fortin: Thank you, Nancy, so kind of you. [1:16]
Nancy Calabrese: Oh, my goodness, all right. Why are you a rebel?
Isabelle Fortin: Oh, oh my God, just because that’s my nature. It’s it is as easy as that. You can’t go against who you are. So, you know, you have to some people are rebels and some people work better inside the lines and I don’t fit in a box. I’m too tall. [1:39]
Nancy Calabrese: Hahaha, too tall? Oh, okay. Well, okay. We can’t tell via the podcast, but okay, that’s a nice height. But you know, and then you say all salespeople are rebels. And if not, they should become one. Why is that?
Isabelle Fortin: Yes, I’m five foot ten. No, exactly. Yeah. I think that most salespeople are really, they have an entrepreneur mind, and they just work for somebody else. And so, they, they, they don’t want to be confined. They don’t want to be, they don’t want to be at the office from Monday to Friday from eight to four. They don’t, they want to be free. They want to do their thing. Don’t ask him where they were on a Tuesday at two 14. They were at the movies. They don’t want to tell you. So, I think that most of them at all of the ones that I met that were extremely good at it were all rebels. [2:43]
Nancy Calabrese: Really interesting. I never thought of myself as a rebel, but I know I’ve never liked anyone to tell me what to do. So, I guess I am a rebel, right?
Isabelle Fortin: And that’s a rebellious mind, isn’t it? I was just saying that. Yeah, that’s the nature of a rebellious mind.
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, I guess so. I never realized. No wonder my parents had a hard time with me. So, what are some of your skill strategies for Rebels?
Isabelle Fortin: Oh, I bet you were a great kid. I think that most sales rebels are extremely people oriented. They’re extremely community and relationship minded. And it is truly for them about cultivating relationships more than anything else. And they make friends before they make clients. Of course, you know, the business that you are in must has to give you that opportunity. I mean, if you’re a salesperson in a store, maybe, you know, that’s a little bit less, especially if it’s a chain store, it’s a little bit less of that. But even then, you know, like how many great people do we find or quite the opposite. You go to a store and the person, you know, won’t look at you or won’t engage or won’t ask anything. Well, we are less likely to go back, right? So, I think that that’s in their nature is to build relationships and it is about selling who they are first. [4:33]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. True.
Isabelle Fortin: And then once the person trusts you, they’re going to buy anything you must sell once they trust you. [4:43]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. So, talk about what is your unique idea that’s different and sets you apart?
Isabelle Fortin: Make friends before you make clients. It is, yeah, that’s one of my mottos is show up with the real true intention to help the other person and not crunching your numbers. So, when it is truly about showing up for the other person and how you can be there and help that person, then that’s, for me, that’s what works the best. [5:30]
Nancy Calabrese: So, can you give us some examples of how you would make a friend? Say you’re walking up to me and what would you ask me or do?
Isabelle Fortin: I would make the entire conversation about you. So, you know, give real human interest. So, one of the things that I tell my client all the time is, it doesn’t really matter what kind of questions you ask, as long as you truly care about the answer you’re going to get. So, it’s not, for me, it’s not so much like the technique or the strategy, it’s more care about the answer and listen to the answer without having a preconceived, either notion or preconceived script as to what you’re going to say after that. So, it’s about truly listening for real to the human. And I have a real-life example. 17 billion years ago when I was you know selling for somebody else, I went to this company and the supplier they had for this specific item was an extremely good company that they had good service, they had good prices. And to be honest, then see, as far as pricing was concerned, we truly couldn’t beat them. We couldn’t, it was, they were unbeatable. And what happened is, you know, I met with the with the buyer and we started talking and, and I said, do you mind me asking who you’re dealing with right now? And he said, you know, company so and so and I said, oh, I don’t want to waste your time. I can’t beat their prices. And he was so shocked by my answer, but I was honest. Said, listen, I know most of the folks that work there, they give great customer service. They are good. Their product is good. Their prices are unbeatable. You know, you are extremely well served. So, you know, it was a great pleasure meeting you. And if you have any other needs for any other, you know, packaging, because it was in the packaging industry, then you can, you know, give me a chance to, to, to submit, you know, pricing, but you know, you’re extremely well served. And that person referred to me to at least 50 % of my clients afterwards, because I was honest. I was honest. I told them the truth. The person that you’re dealing with right now, I can’t beat that. I really can’t. So, I made a friend and I’m still that was 28 years ago now, which, you know, I disagree with but it worked and I do, I didn’t do it to get the results I got, I did it because it was the right thing to do in that moment. [8:44]
Nancy Calabrese: Sure. Are you still in touch with this person?
Isabelle Fortin: I am. He’s retired now, but yeah, we stayed connected for all these years. Yeah.
Nancy Calabrese: I wonder if there’s an opportunity at his firm now that he’s retired. You know what? The mind of a salesperson, right? Stop pushing forward. Is there anything in particular you want me to spotlight?
Isabelle Fortin: Hey, maybe. Oh, I think that real good salespeople thrive better if they’re in the environment. Well, I believe that of anybody, but especially when it comes to salespeople thrive when the culture of the company that they work for understands that they cannot be treated like every other employee because they are different. And I find that, you know, sales managers, there’s only 6 % of them that get training in manager. And yeah, only 6 % the stats are scary. And very often. Very often it’s my belief that either the company took their top salesman and or salesperson, excuse me, and decided to make them the manager or worse yet, they took somebody from another department and decided, Hey, you’re, you’re a good manager. So, you can now lead the sales team. Sales is a different kind of species. And if you treat them the same as everybody else, they’re going to underperform and they’re going to look for a job very quickly. And I think that that is the biggest mistake that most companies do is deal with their salespeople the quote unquote wrong way. [10:58]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. And you know, I’m curious, did your military experience have anything to do with you wanting to go into sales? Was there a connection?
Isabelle Fortin: Um, there, the connection that, that is between the two is that what I brought to my personal life and my professional life from the military was you can work well with somebody you don’t like. And, um, you don’t need, I hear coaches say that very often know, find the commonality, find, you know, if that person likes ballet or bowling or whatever, and you like that too, then you know, that’s something to base the relationship on. And it’s, it’s, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I’m saying sometimes the commonality is just the fact that you’re both humans living on this planet. So, it doesn’t have to be like you don’t have to share a passion with somebody to get along with them. And that’s where I got that from the military because in service you literally like firefighter the same way. Police officers are the same way. Military. You don’t have to like someone. You just need to recognize that that person is doing the best that they can with the hand that they’ve been dealt. And so that’s, that’s what I bring from my military career to my consulting company now. [12:45]
Nancy Calabrese: Interesting. So how do you turn rebels into rock stars?
Isabelle Fortin: By helping the managers understand and how to deal with the salespeople. So, you don’t micromanage, you set clear expectations. And you know, I say that to my clients all the time. You don’t need, if you’re dealing with real salespeople, you don’t even need to set high expectations or high goals as to as far as their sales numbers are concerned because I’ll bet you anything that their targets are higher than yours because they’re working for themselves. They are self-motivated. They want the new toy and the new shiny car and it’s in their go getters. They are naturally going getters. If you help, if I help and I do help the managers understand how to individually tap into the unique abilities of every single member of their teams, then the sky’s the limit. That’s how you turn a rebel into a rock star. Because if you give that person the tool, if you give the rebel the tools that they need, they will become rock stars. [14:17]
Nancy Calabrese: So, you give them all the tools, but they’re not becoming a rock star. What do you do next?
Isabelle Fortin: Find out why. Because there’s a reason the company culture is not aligned, although maybe your communication style isn’t aligned with the way that they understand the world. You find why because there’s always a why there’s always if you tap into the true motivation of somebody there, they are going to. Become rock stars, it’s inevitable. [14:54]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. So, tell me a fun fact about you.
Isabelle Fortin: Make sense? I’m a ballroom dancer.
Nancy Calabrese: You are! Cool!
Isabelle Fortin: I wasn’t expecting that question. I don’t think you were expecting that answer. Yeah, I’ve been dancing since 1998. And, and that is how I recharge my batteries is by going dancing.
Nancy Calabrese: Wow. I love it. What does it do? Does it make you just forget about everything?
Isabelle Fortin: It makes me connect to another human being in a whole different way because it’s about truly paying attention to your partner, and it is about 100 % being in the moment. And that’s for me, that’s the greatest escape from my life and from my mind, because we’re all in each in our own way, right? We’re all humans and that’s part of the human experience, I think. And that’s the way for me to take a break from my mind is to go dancing. And a good night, Nancy, a good night of dancing, which I had two days ago. Saturday night I went dancing and I left the dance floor. My feet were bleeding and I thought, ah, that was a good night. [16:24]
Nancy Calabrese: Oh really? All right, well, we’ll take a sidebar on that one. I don’t know about bleeding feet is where you want to go. Tell me something. Yes, it does. I don’t know. Tell me something true that almost nobody agrees with you on.
Isabelle Fortin: It sounds masochistic, doesn’t it? Yes. Oh wow, oh that’s a great question. Oh my, oh, I wasn’t prepared for that question. Don’t hang on to, regardless of the nature of the relationship, if it’s toxic for you, then don’t hang out. And I take that to a whole new level. I will cut ties with my siblings if they become toxic. I find that people in general offer, other people more than the relationship, not the people, but the relationship is worth. [17:35]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. By the way, I totally agree with you.
Isabelle Fortin: And I… Well, thank you, but I get a lot of pushbacks. Do you?
Nancy Calabrese: Well, I have walked away from certain people because it was toxic. And yes, I do get pushback, but I stand firm on it. It makes me sick. It’s not for me to be around.
Isabelle Fortin: Yeah, yeah. But I find that we, I, you know, I was raised Catholic. I, you know, I grew up with the, you know, but yeah, but they give that person a chance or, you know, they didn’t do anything wrong to you or blah, blah, blah. And and you push yourself in a corner and you hang on to people and we do the same thing with our mistakes by the way. We hold on to mistakes because we’ve been doing them for so long. Well, if it doesn’t work for you, move on, take the lesson and leave. [18:37]
Nancy Calabrese: I totally, totally agree with you on. You know, we’re, we’re, I can’t believe, I told you this was going to go by fast. Last two questions. What is the one takeaway you’d like to leave the audience with?
Isabelle Fortin: Let yourself, if you’re a salesperson, if you’re any human, but especially for sales, because this is the topic, if you’re in an environment that is not aligned or is not letting you be who you are and celebrate the way that you do things, find another place. If I’m speaking in front of 200 people and 200 people boo me, it’s not there’s something wrong with my message. It’s because I’m in the wrong crowd. So, find a better crowd. [19:35]
Nancy Calabrese: wrong crowd. You know, I love that. That’s a really healthy way to think about things. How can my people find you?
Isabelle Fortin: Oh, LinkedIn is pretty much where I hang out all the time. I have a YouTube channel, but I’m it doesn’t have a lot of subscribers. Yeah. So, hey, maybe that’s a great place to for them to go check out my stuff. But LinkedIn is where I spend most of my time. Yeah. [20:04]
Nancy Calabrese: Okay, so it’s Isabelle, I -S -A -B -E -L -L -E, Fortin, F -O -R -T -I -N. They will come speak you out and I so appreciate you taking the time to speak with me and share your rebelliousness with our audience. You’re great and everyone out there, you know, if you’re not a rebel, you need to be a rebel, especially if you’re in sales. So make it a great rebellious sales day and we’ll see you next time. [20:41]
by Nancy Calabrese | May 16, 2024 | Podcast
About Alice Myerhoff: Alice Myerhoff is the Founder of Myerhoff Consulting, which helps mission-oriented startups and SMBs with growth strategy, partnerships, and sales processes to increase revenue and maximize their positive social impact. Alice is a Sales and Business Development leader, author, and strategic deal-maker who has built customer portfolios from the ground up and client bases from ZERO. She brings a wealth of multicultural experience across several corporate, education, and nonprofit sectors. 20+ years background in online media/news/advertising/events, educational technology/software, social impact/businesses, real estate, computer gaming, and financial services. Previously held executive-level positions at workforce development, gender equity, and education-focused organizations. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Alice.
In this episode, Nancy and Alice discuss the following:
- Definition of mission-driven organizations
- Significance of effective sales strategy
- Consistency of sales principles across industries
- Maximizing conference ROI
- Conference attendee privacy
- Evaluating conference investments
- The Sales Glow Up initiative with Lisa Scotto
Key Takeaways:
- I’m interested in supporting organizations that will leave the world in a better place.
- You can be very methodical about approaching a conference, even as just an attendee, so you get your money’s worth out of it.
- I think if people at the beginning of their sales careers can embrace that and not have it be such an emotional roller coaster, which sales sometimes is, they could save a lot of stress.
“I think having a definition around who you’re targeting is kind of the baseline number one issue. You can’t really reach out to your targets if you don’t have a target in mind. A phrase that I like to use is, ‘You can’t boil the ocean,’ right? So, let’s think about who the client is, how we can reach them, where they are, what they care about, and their pain points. That’s the first step. And then having some methodology, like, do you have a CRM? Do you have it set up in a way that allows you to make strategic decisions based on the data you’re collecting? Those types of things are pretty key. I like to get my hands dirty, you know?” – ALICE
“Attendees don’t like to be spammed. Imagine attending a conference; you’d have a hundred exhibitors, and everybody knew you would be there. How many emails are you going to get? And they’ll annoy you. And maybe you won’t attend the conference again because you don’t want to be on that list. So, conferences don’t do that. But that doesn’t mean you can’t figure out who’s likely to be there, right? So, you can – this sounds super basic, but sometimes people don’t think of it – look at the agenda for the conference. Who are the speakers? You know they’ll be there, right? They must show up. Or, you know, sponsors, exhibitors –they will have people on site. And you can even build outreach campaigns just around that information, right? You can make a pretty good guess. This type of company will probably send out a salesperson or a marketing person, depending on what the conference is about. And even if that is your specific target, they can maybe help you connect with that person.” – ALICE
“People kind of like that idea of showing up at a conference and winging it. I think a lot of people are selling the same way. They’re sort of winging it, and you can pick up little tidbits here and there. There’s lots of thought leadership stuff happening. I mean, our little videos are part of that, too, even. But building a methodology that allows you to be consistent and have some rigor can make a huge difference. So yeah, I support that. And you know, Nancy, the bigger vision with Sales Glow Up is to create something like that.” – ALICE
Connect with Alice Myerhoff:
Try Our Proven, 3-Step System, Guaranteeing Accountability and Transparency that Drives RESULTS by clicking on this link: https://oneofakindsales.com/call-center-in-a-box/
Connect with Nancy Calabrese:
by Nancy Calabrese | May 9, 2024 | Podcast
About Nigel Green: Nigel Green is an Advisor to Founders and Sales Leaders and the Author of “Revenue Harvest: A Sales Leader’s Almanac For Planning The Perfect Year.” Executives and sales leaders hire Nigel to improve sales team performance. By the age of 31, he was a Fortune 300 executive sales leader who had led sales for two healthcare companies that both experienced successful financial exits. Since publishing Revenue Harvest, he has advised dozens of sales teams on building a best-in-class sales team. Two of his clients have scaled and sold for more than 3X EBITDA, while others have attracted investments from top venture funds. Most importantly, they hit their sales targets. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Nigel.
In this episode, Nancy and Nigel discuss the following:
- Problems sales leaders face daily
- Focus areas for sales leaders: revenue, profitability, new customers
- Frequency of team meetings for sales leaders
- Importance of asking better questions
- Sales aptitude tests: context and application
- Hiring based on competency alone vs. considering chemistry and character
- Distinction between a good salesperson and a good sales leader
Key Takeaways:
- You must build a team to create customers at scale that aligns with the business’s overarching strategy.
- Good sales leaders are productively paranoid about what is right around the corner that could derail my team.
- At least once a week, the leader has to meet with the team and remind them of this responsibility to meet and exceed future business expectations.
“I think the problems that sales leaders face could be bucketed under majoring in the minor things. And what that means, if we were to unpack it, is that if you found yourself in this position, it would sound all too familiar to you. You look back on your day; you were busy and did a lot of stuff. Most of what you did was probably internal and not enough external, meaning that you were on, especially today; we’re recording this on a Monday. So, a lot of sales leaders today will spend their entire Monday in meetings that will probably not create one single customer, and they will probably not be involved in any training or development of the sales team. And it’s certainly not going to be involved in the overarching strategy of the business. It’s probably going to be meetings that involve updates around product or operations, updates that have already happened and that you cannot control and ultimately won’t matter in creating a customer, training a rep, or the overarching strategy of the business. And that’s the biggest problem: many sales leaders don’t have enough autonomy in their schedule. And if they do have autonomy, they’re still not spending it on the three areas of the business that matter most: customers, reps, strategy.” – NIGEL
“I ask a lot of really good questions. So, it gets to where I’d never really have to ask anyone for an investment or to hire me because they see through the power of my questions that their life might be better if they had me as an extension of their team. So, that translates, I think, naturally to the types of things that I work on in my coaching business, which is primarily what I do as coach sales leaders. I help them improve the quality of their questions. And as they start asking better questions, they start having better problems. Better problems lead to better results. So, we get to this place where we don’t have an activity problem, or we don’t have a “we’re not hitting our sales” problem. We start having deeper problems around strategy, positioning, technology, compensation plans, team structure, data, and augmenting sales reps with better support systems—not just hiring more people but hiring various sellers for different types of roles in the sales organization. And we start having better problems.” – NIGEL
“If you want to transform your sales team, you’ve got to understand that your sales team is only as good as your worst rep, and your worst rep is probably the one that gives you an insight into your sales leader’s tolerance threshold. And so be pushing yourselves later to always try to replace your worst rep with a new one. And sometimes replacing your worst rep with a new rep is taking that individual and making them better, making them fundamentally. I’m not advocating for just creating a bunch of turnovers, but I think, you know, if I’m a leader of an organization, I’m trying to find out where’s my weakest link and how do I go about systemically attacking that to making it better.” – NIGEL
Connect with Nigel Green:
Try Our Proven, 3-Step System, Guaranteeing Accountability and Transparency that Drives RESULTS by clicking on this link: https://oneofakindsales.com/call-center-in-a-box/
Connect with Nancy Calabrese:
by Nancy Calabrese | May 7, 2024 | Podcast
About Roy Osing: Roy Osing is a former president, CMO, and entrepreneur with over 40 years of successful and unmatched experience in executive leadership in every aspect of business. As President of a major data and internet company, his leadership and audacious ‘unheard-of ways’ took the company from its early stage to $1 Billion in annual sales. He is devoted to inspiring leaders, entrepreneurs, and organizations to stand apart from the average boring crowd and achieve their true potential. He is a resolute blogger, keen content marketer, dedicated teacher, and mentor to young professionals. As an accomplished business advisor, he is the author of the no-nonsense book series ‘BE DiFFERENT or be dead.’ Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Roy.
In this episode, Nancy and Roy discuss the following:
- Importance of differentiation in business
- Roy’s concept of the “only statement”
- Use of passionate language to capture attention
- Cultivating a client-centric culture
- An unconventional approach to recruitment: “Hiring for Goosebumps”
- Embracing audaciousness to stand out
Key Takeaways:
- Differentiation is the key issue facing businesses today. Without it, organizations eventually die.
- Step outside your comfort zone and do things differently.
- Treat discomfort as your strategic ally. Be audacious, be brave, and choose to be different every day.
- Stand out by doing things others aren’t doing.
“And so, I came up with this hiring for Goosebumps approach, which went as follows. First, I, as President of the company, was involved in panel interviews with most of the people we were hiring. And I did that for a specific reason. First, I wanted to show the people in my organization who sat around me what to do, and hopefully, hopefully, that they would copy what I did. Secondly, it shows the person applying for a job that they are important. So, I asked them two fundamental questions. I go, “Nancy, what I’d like to know is, do you love human beings?” Now, you would typically go, “Wow, okay, I’ve never had that question before. I think I know the right answer, but I have no idea where this dude is going with it.” And you would say, “Well, yes, I do, Roy. I love human beings.” I’d say, “Okay.” So, the second question would be, “Tell me a story. Tell me a story that proves to me that you love humans.” Now, this is the killer question, okay, because it separated the wheat from the chaff. The people that treated this as an academic exercise would give me a story that left me cold. Okay. There wasn’t any truth to it. It was all mumbo jumbo, superficial, narcissistic chatter from this individual, right? But the person that had the gene told me a story that was so rich and passionate in terms of how they related to people and their feelings for people. Guess what it did, Nancy. It left me with goosebumps, and I got him right now. I would hire that person and teach him the business. People thought I was crazy. To this day, I can have; a while ago, I had a podcast with a PhD in HR in New York, and I told her this story, and she just went apoplectic. In fact, we had to stop the interview. She couldn’t take it.” – ROY
“I want you to be different. I want you to go out, be brave, be audacious, and choose to be different today, right now, in the moment, in some small way. I want you to be uncomfortable. I want you to treat discomfort as your strategic ally. I want you to do it. And tomorrow, I want you to do two things and be different. And the next day, I want you to do three things. I want you to sort of get this persona strand going for you because we need you to be different. Okay, we don’t need you to conform. We don’t need you to comply with the rules. Now, I’m not talking about being illegal. I’m saying step out, be creative, be innovative, and do things other people aren’t doing. That’s the source of joy. That’s the source of economic opportunity. And we need you in business and organizations to be that way. And you salespeople, if you’re not the only one that does what you do, Why do you have a job?” – ROY
“Step outside of your comfort zone, but do things differently than everybody else does. Okay, I don’t want you to be uncomfortable and continue to do the same thing as everybody else. I want you to be uncomfortable because you’re doing things differently, right? In a way that people care about. And the only point I want to make here is that this is not about you doing things for yourself. This is about you doing things differently in a way other people care about. So, my whole “be different” philosophy, Nancy, is about serving others in a way that no one else does. And salespeople, I want you to do that. I want you to serve your clients like no one else does. And I don’t care about the textbook. Okay, the textbook got you this far. I want you to put it down. I want you to put the textbook down and do some practical human things that are different than everybody else, including the textbook, that light fires in your client’s eyes. And guess what it does to them? It wants them to buy from you because they believe in you, trust you, follow you, and be loyal to the company. Boom. And there goes the revenue lineup. And that’s what we want you to do.” – ROY
Connect with Roy Osing:
Try Our Proven, 3-Step System, Guaranteeing Accountability and Transparency that Drives RESULTS by clicking on this link: https://oneofakindsales.com/call-center-in-a-box/
Connect with Nancy Calabrese:
Voiceover: You’re listening to The Conversational Selling Podcast with Nancy Calabrese.
Nancy Calabrese: Hi, it’s Nancy Calabrese, and it’s time again for Conversational selling – the podcast where sales leaders and business experts share what’s going on in sales and marketing today and it always starts with the human conversation. Today we’re speaking with Roy Osing, a guy who took a startup internet company to a billion in sales. He is the only author entrepreneur and executive leader who delivers practical and proven, audacious, unheard-of ways to produce high performing businesses and successful careers. He is a blogger, content marketer and mentor to young professionals. As an accomplished business advisor, Roy is the author of the no nonsense book series, Be Different or Be Dead. With the audacious unheard-of ways, I took a startup to a billion in sales as his seventh. Welcome to the show, Roy. This is going to be a lot of fun.
Roy Osing: Hey Nancy, thanks very much for having me. I’m honored, believe me. [1:20]
Nancy Calabrese: Well, listen, your words are really catchy and let’s just jump right into it. What was the idea behind Be Different or Be Dead? And how does that relate to sales?
Roy Osing: So my experience, and I’ve been at this for like 40 years, very early on was that organizations didn’t really do a very good job of differentiating themselves from one another. They couldn’t answer the question that a customer might ask, which is, why should I do business with you and not your competitor? [1:54]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. Right.
Roy Osing: And so, it led me down the path of saying that differentiation is, in my view, it was then, and it is now the key issue facing businesses. And the consequences, quite frankly, of not differentiating at all is that your organization eventually dies, quite frankly. And I know that sounds draconian, but it is. There’s too much claptrap what I call out there where people claim that they’re better, they’re best, they’re number one, they’re the market leader. And quite frankly, Nancy, it’s hogwash. They’re not. Okay. And so, I had to create my own process, which I call the only statement, which says we are the only ones who do what we do. And there’s a lot of detail behind that as my way of counteracting this clap trap. So, the be different or be dead thing simply says, if you’re not different in some meaningful way that people care about, eventually as an organization, you will die. [2:52]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, wow. Wow, so where do you come up with all these terms? Audacious, claptrap, catchy words.
Roy Osing: Well, you know, language is so important when you’re trying to get people’s attention. And I guess one of the failings that I’ve had is that I’ve been at this, I wrote my first book in 2009 and basically started formally this thing, although I’ve lived it my whole life. And it’s kind of like an admission of failure on my part to say, I don’t think we’ve really moved the yardsticks very far from claptrap into being the only ones who do what we do. And so my tactic is to try and use as passionate, emotional kinds of language as I can to kind of capture the imagination and interest in people to take a look at why should you be different? And so words like unheard of and astonishing and unmatchable and audacious, they’re intended specifically to say, oh, what’s that all about? And if I can get you in to listen, then I might be able to convert you. [3:59]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. So, what does it take to be an audacious salesperson or leader?
Roy Osing: Yeah, well, the first thing is I have to say that without the right context and culture, it’s basically impossible. And I thought a lot about your mission and your persona around personable strategies and human connection, of which I totally agree with. The problem is unless the sales organization has an environment within which the strategy is about building customer loyalty and the culture is about behaving in a way that people care about it’s really hard for sales to be audacious. Like I can give you a whole bunch of tactics, but quite frankly, sales will be an island onto themselves unless we have the right context built for them to succeed. And my observation is because for the most part, salespeople today tend to be product floggers and it’s not their fault. Okay. And so, I would say that leadership has a bigger role to play than trying to teach salespeople how to be tactically more efficient. I can do that, but the reality is in terms of their effectiveness without the right environment, they will fail. [5:21]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. Yeah. So how do you build that culture of cultivating salespeople to be client -centric?
Roy Osing: First of all, it’s not about sales, it’s about the organization. And there are two things, because, you know, there are customer service and there’s all sorts of other functions in a business that need to have the same behavior. So, for me, there’s two pieces here. One is strategic context. Okay, leaders need to build a strategy that encourages building long -term customer loyalty in favor of short -term sales. Okay, I mean, if the quota in 12 months dominates, you’re never going to have a relationship building culture because people don’t build strong relationships in 12 months in some cases, right? So, the strategy needs to be around building your existing base and growing on the base of those existing customers. The second piece is all about behaviors and that’s the culture piece, right? That says, okay, we need to treat human beings as human beings. We need to love human beings. While people cannot be trained to love human beings, Nancy, you know that. You can train them to grin, and you can train them to have a smile in their voice, but you cannot train their DNA to have a fundamental desire to serve people. And so, there’s a huge recruitment piece in here that I had a whole bunch of fun in, in terms of hiring for Goosebumps that requires you to execute on before you can even go down the journey. And so I say to leaders, if you cannot create the environment, okay, within which you can expect certain sales behaviors, then those behaviors will not happen. It occurred to me 100 years ago that we don’t need sales. Okay, what we need are people that serve human beings, right? And I don’t care what you call them. If you can serve them, in a way that solves their problems in a unique way so that you’re the only ones that do what you do, they will automatically, they will buy from you as opposed to you flogging at them and you selling them. We don’t need people to sell. We need customers to buy, and they buy within an environment where you have certain behaviors that exhibit, they care for you. They, they treat you with dignity and respect. They follow up with you. They answer the phone call, or they answer the email immediately. In other words, they care about you. But if the comp plan doesn’t honor that, rather it honors how many products you’ve sold, you’ll never make the transition. It’ll never happen. [8:10]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. Yeah. Well, so how does a guy take a startup to a billion in sales? How did you make it happen?
Roy Osing: Well, first of all, we had no idea that it was going to be that successful. And by the way, you can’t see this, but whenever I start talking about this, I get, I get goosebumps because it was such an amazing achievement by just a team of turned-on amazing people. So, what we knew was Nancy, that the opportunity, and this was in the early days of the internet, we knew that the opportunity was huge. Okay. We just didn’t know how huge it was, and we were sitting in a monopoly telephone company at the time. And so, we had to literally change the culture away from order taking and engineering to proactive selling, if you will, a relationship building, customer service and marketing. And so that was a huge undertaking in simply how to do that. And the way I chose to do it, was to basically discard tradition. I’m a disrupter. My basic nature, it always has been according to my mother, has always been to disrupt the status quo. And in this particular case, it was the only way to break away from that strong monopoly-based culture that really had the grips on the company for a long time. Right. And so, my choice was to basically do things differently. I chose to do things differently in terms of how we approached planning, how we approached operations, how we approached recruitment, how we approached customer service and sales. I basically took all those functions, turned them upside down and said, hey, what if we tried a different approach, okay, that captured the hearts and minds of people in the organization? Because really, it’s not about the efficacy or your plan anyways. If you can’t turn people on to execute and help you on the journey, then nothing happens. And so, my strategy, I kind of coined my leadership as leadership by serving around. And it was all about how can I help? How can I help you? Because if I could do that, and it wasn’t about the cool ideas, it was about top line performance. But if I could light your fire, then I would be willing to bet that our top line performance is going to go through the roof. And in fact, it did year over year. It just took off and people just joined the journey. I mean, we had an army of advocates, Nancy, and throwing away the traditional approach to doing things. We hired for goosebumps. We killed dumb rules. We cut the crap. You know, we had line of sight leadership to get rid of organizational dysfunction. So, you know, there’s a lot of small crazy things that you won’t find in any other book, but mine that actually worked, you know, based on practical approach to business, not based on, on textbook theory, which I have a difficult time with anyways, which probably wouldn’t surprise you. [11:15]
Nancy Calabrese: Well, listen, I love that you make it all about them, helping them, not worrying about yourself. I mean, I think that makes a whole lot of sense. Tell me something you know is true that a lot of people don’t agree with you on.
Roy Osing: Well, I’ll tell you, my, my, the basic approach to, to recruiting people was something that I had to do to attract people that loved human beings. And basically, the theorists and the academics in the world, they don’t believe it because it doesn’t conform to standard HR theory. And let me just give you a thumbnail on it. Okay. My logic was that if I, if you want to dazzle people, if you want to build a relationship, people, they must trust you. And fundamentally that individual must love human beings. They must have; the employee needs to have the loving humans running through their veins. They need to be born with the innate desire to serve people. That was my reasoning. And I said, well, okay, you know, because if you don’t like humans, you’re not going to be good in sales. You’re not going to be good in customer service. You’re not going to be an internal audit. You’re not going to be an employee that helps you foster a culture of caring if I can call it that. [12:33]
Nancy Calabrese: Listen, if you don’t like humans, you’re not going to fit in anywhere.
Roy Osing: Yeah, and some people would say who needs them because we got chat bots and I say take that away. Anyways, we can do a whole show on that because I have such vehement feelings. Anyways, so here’s the deal. Okay, so how can I tell if a person loves homo sapiens? That was my question. And so, I came up with this hiring for Goosebumps approach, which went as follows. First, I, as president of the company, I was involved in panel interviews of most people who we were hiring. And I did that for a specific reason. First, to show the people in my organization who sat around me what to do and hopefully, hopefully that they would copy what I did. And secondly, to show the person applying for a job that they were important. So, I asked them two fundamental questions. I go, Nancy, what I’d like to know is, do you love human beings? Now what you would typically do is you go, wow, okay, I’ve never had that question before. I think I know what the right answer is, but I got no idea where this dude is going with it. And you would say, well, yes, I do, Roy. I love human beings. I’d say, okay. So, the second question would be, tell me a story. Tell me a story that proves to me that you love humans. Now this is the killer question, okay, because it clearly, it separated the wheat from the chaff. The people that treated this as an academic exercise would give me a story that left me cold. Okay. There wasn’t any truth to it. It was all mumbo jumbo, superficial, narcissistic kind of chatter from this individual, right? But the person that really had the gene told me a story that was so rich and passionate in terms of how they related people and their feelings for people. Guess what it did, Nancy. It left me with, and I got him right now, goosebumps. I would hire that person and teach him the business. People thought I was crazy. And to this day, I can have, in fact, a while ago, I had a podcast with a PhD in HR in New York, and I told her this story and she just went apoplectic. In fact, we had to stop the interview. She couldn’t take it. [14:53]
Nancy Calabrese: She did?
Roy Osing: Oh, I stopped it. I said, I said to her, let’s call her Joan. I said, Joan, you’re really having a hard time with this, aren’t you? She says, yeah, it’s not true. I said, yes, it is true. Do you know how I know that? And she says, how? And I said, I built a business to a billion. What proof do you have other than textbooks? And so, we went at this, and I finally said, peace. I got, I’m out of here. I don’t want to talk to somebody that is not willing to accept the practicality of something that works, that doesn’t necessarily coincide with academic principles. Hell, nothing I did, okay? Nothing I did at the practical level went that way. And yet for some amazing reason, it lit fires in people’s stomachs and hearts and got them to perform and we got a billion. Boom. [15:41]
Nancy Calabrese: Wow. All right, well, wait a minute. Give us an example of the perfect story.
Roy Osing: Well, I mean, it must be, yeah, okay. So, a personal story would sort of go like this. The individual probably at some point had a very, very difficult situation in their life with somebody who opposed them at every junction. And rather than taking that on in some sort of conflict way, what they did is they actually were quite empathetic for the behavior that they were facing, and they could actually remove themselves from that and look at it objectively and decide what the appropriate behavior was going to be. And the right behavior for that person was listening, responding in a feeling -caring way, trying to find out the source of the angst and the issue. And then leading into a solution that was acceptable by both as opposed to, you know, enforcing rules or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it’s more than the, it was more than the detail of the story. It was like how the individual talked about it. You know, the tone of voice, you can hear the feelings exude from the body of this individual. And so, you know, for me, you couldn’t capture that on a, on a questionnaire. For example, you had to hear it. You had to feel it. You had to touch the emotion and, and without that. And the interesting thing was, you know, my management team, after having, after going through this a while with me, they got it. They, they became pretty doggone good at it. And after a while it became, well, you know, who did you hire? Who gave you goosebumps today? Roy, everybody knew what that meant. I got him again. I can’t stand it. [17:43]
Nancy Calabrese: I love goosebumps. I think it’s great. I think it’s great. I can’t believe we’re almost up in time, Roy. I mean, we could go on and on. What is the one takeaway you want to leave the audience with?
Roy Osing: I want you to be different. I want you to go out, be brave, be audacious, and choose to be different today, right now, in the moment, in some small way. I want you to be uncomfortable. I want you to treat discomfort as your strategic ally. I want you to do it. And tomorrow, I want you to do two things, and the different. And the next day, I want you to do three things. I want you to sort of get this kind of like persona strand going for you because we need you to be different. Okay, we don’t need you to conform. We don’t need you to comply with the rules. Now I’m not talking about being illegal. I’m saying step out, be creative, be innovative, do things that other people aren’t doing. That’s the source of joy. That’s the source of economic opportunity. And we need you in business and organizations to be that way. And you salespeople, if you’re not the only one that does what you do, Why do you have a job? [19:01]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, wow. So step outside of your comfort zone is what you’re saying. Push yourself.
Roy Osing: Yeah, not just that. Step outside of your comfort zone but do things differently than what everybody else is doing. Okay, I don’t want you to be uncomfortable and continue to do the same thing as everybody else. I want you to be uncomfortable because you’re doing things differently, right, in a way that people care about. And the only point I want to make here too; this is not about you doing things for you. This is about you doing things differently in a way other people care about. So, the whole be different philosophy that I have, Nancy, is about serving others in a way that no one else does. And salespeople, I want you to do that. I want you to serve your clients in a way that no one else does. And I don’t care about the textbook. Okay, the textbook got you this far. I want you to put it down. I want you to put the textbook down and do some practical human things that are different than everybody else, including the textbook that light fires in the eyes of your client. And guess what it does to them? It wants them to buy from you because they believe in you, they trust you, they will follow you and they will be loyal to the company. Boom. And there goes the revenue line up. And that’s what we want you to do. [20:22]
Nancy Calabrese: Love it, love it. How can my people find you?
Roy Osing: While I’m on bedifferentorbedead .com, I’ve been blogging on this stuff for a long time since 2009, so check it out. There’s some information on my website about my books, you can do that. And I have an email, roi .osing .gmail .com. For heaven’s sakes, I’m happy to have a conversation with people about what’s going on with them and if there’s any way I can help them. So please take advantage of me. [20:52]
Nancy Calabrese: Hey, you know what? Besides being a wonderful expert in what you do, you have a great voice. Did anybody ever tell you that?
Roy Osing: I’d like to, yes, I’ve heard that before, but I try not to let it go to my head. Because I don’t know what the use is, yes. [21:11]
Nancy Calabrese: You mean it doesn’t. Does it give you goosebumps when you hear it? Oh.
Roy Osing: No, no, it does not. It’s loud though. And I, my wife is always giving me my heck for the fact that I’ve never needed a microphone, quite frankly, and all of the speeches and, and presentations and that, that I’ve given in large groups, conferences, I rarely need a microphone. And I guess that’s just because of what you just said. And, and I’m grateful for that gift. Yeah. And I, I hope that it never, it’s never let me down. So, thank you for mentioning. [21:46]
Nancy Calabrese: Oh, yeah. So, people, he’s the guy, Roy Osing. Reach out to him. And, you know, I think what you have to offer is amazing. And the key word is stand out and be different. So until we meet again, Roy, thanks so much for spending time with us today and make it an amazing sales day, everyone. We’ll see you next time. [22:16]
by Nancy Calabrese | May 3, 2024 | Podcast
About Jason Friedman: Jason Friedman is the Founder and CEO at CXFormula, LLC, helping small businesses and entrepreneurs grow and scale their businesses, increasing customer engagement, loyalty, retention, revenues, and profits while improving their customer experience and creating raving fans. Their approach is at the intersection of psychology, theatre, business, and marketing. With decades of theatre experience between them, they combine the art of storytelling with the science of human behavior to create reliable and consistent customer momentum, generate massive engagement, and achieve incredible business growth. Jason has worked with some of the biggest brands in the world, including Nike, Disney, Foot Locker, Bank of America, and Harvard, to name a few. He’s changing the way people look at the customer journey. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Jason.
In this episode, Nancy and Jason discuss the following:
- How his journey in theater inspired Jason to develop the Kinetic Customer Formula
- The importance of shifting perspectives to prioritize the customer experience
- Flipping the sales funnel to focus on customer success
- Adopting a strategic approach to over-delivery.
- The transformative effects of prioritizing customer success.
Key Takeaways:
- Onboarding is how we help people move from one type of relationship to the next, like every transition, and a relationship is an opportunity for onboarding.
- Overdelivery is going to kill your business.
- Focus on the experience you’re creating for your customers: take a look at it through their eyes.
“What we did in theater, it’s like: people come into a show, and all the problems in the world are going on for them. Suddenly, they disappear as the orchestra plays, the lights fade, and they become very present. As the story continues, they laugh at certain moments, shriek back at others, and clap. It’s all choreographed to the end, where they are on a journey, experiencing a transformation, moving to their feet with glorious applause and standing ovations. After like 20 years of doing this, I realized, you know what? Like, I know how to keep customers’ attention and bring them in, crafting the journey that customers go on with brands, companies, online businesses, offline businesses, products, services – you name it. We help businesses create deeper engagement, focusing on clients and building deeper relationships. It results in much bigger businesses, helping you scale your business. That’s what the Kinetic Customer Formula is: all those years of experience packed into one nice little package.” – JASON
“Because what ends up happening is the first light bulb that goes off is the realization that we as businesses make it hard for our customers to do business with us. […] And so, the first thing I do is have them learn how to shift their perspective and understand the business from the customer’s point of view. And when you do that, you realize: “Oh God, this is like, I wouldn’t want to be my customer in many ways.” And that first kind of light bulb that goes off is an emotional light bulb. Some people have, you know, felt bad because they have done everything they’ve done, and all they have decided to help the customers. [..] The second light bulb is where people start to understand: “Well, okay, I get it. We can remove the friction, but I still have all this competition, spending all this money on ads and all my clients. I’m still not getting as many people in. I’m still not optimized”. And the second light bulb is that we spend all our energy focusing on how to get strangers to come to our business and talk to us, and very little of our energy and money resources on helping the people who said yes to us get those results. Now, I will help them shift their focus to the other side of the funnel. So, we flip the funnel. Those are the first two big light bulbs that blow up for people. And then from there, we go we go further.” – JASON
“If you can understand your customers that deeply, you can start to provide the journey they need to go on and make them feel safe and comfortable going on because you understand them. And most businesses know such superficial information about our customers, but when we start to go into this kind of a way to look at it, we uncover so much more. And that’s where we start to realize: “Oh, you know what? I can look at the business through their lens. I get them now”. In fact, in most companies that we work with, Nancy says to me: “Jason, you’re great. I used to hate some of my customers. I have fallen in love with them. I understand them better, and they appreciate me more because they know they feel understood”. And that changes the entire dynamic.” – JASON
Connect with Jason Friedman:
Try Our Proven, 3-Step System, Guaranteeing Accountability and Transparency that Drives RESULTS by clicking on this link: https://oneofakindsales.com/call-center-in-a-box/
Connect with Nancy Calabrese:
Voiceover: You’re listening to The Conversational Selling Podcast with Nancy Calabrese.
Nancy Calabrese: Hi, it’s Nancy Calabrese, and it’s time again for Conversational selling – the podcast where sales leaders and business experts share what’s going on in sales and marketing today and it always starts with the human conversation. Today we’re speaking with Jason Friedman, founder and CEO of CX Formula, working with fast growing entrepreneurial companies to help them grow and scale businesses that give them stability, purpose and energy to work smarter and live better using his proprietary kinetic customer formula. Over the past 25 years, Jason has sold over 200 million in products and services through their various companies. He’s consulted with hundreds of entrepreneurs helping them grow and scale their businesses. And in addition to all of this, Jason is also CEO of Spotlight Brand Services, a marketing and brand management agency helping e-commerce businesses crush it on Amazon and other online marketplaces. Wow, Jason, where should we start? Welcome to the show.
Jason Friedman: Hey Nancy, thanks for having me. Super excited to be with you today. [1:29]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, this is going to be fun. So why don’t we jump right in and maybe you can share with us what the kinetic customer formula is about.
Jason Friedman: Yeah, so, you know, it’s a funny story. I started out, my whole journey started when I was a kid, and I was brought into the world of theater. And so, I was a behind the scenes guy, did wax and lighting and things like that. And it started at summer camp when I was very young, and each year kept kind of doing more and more of it. And I had this kind of Mr. Miyagi, wax on, wax off experience, where I learned how to engage an audience like kind of accidentally, right? And so, what we did in theater, it’s like people come into a show and all the problems in the world are going on for them. And all of a sudden, they kind of disappear as the orchestra starts to play and the lights start to fade, and they become very present. And as the story goes on, they laugh at certain moments, and they shriek back at certain moments, and they clap. And it’s all choreographed to the end where they are on a journey, and they have this transformation where they are moved by the end of it and they hope to their feet and their glorious applause and standing ovations. And it was like the same experience night after night. And so after like 20 years of doing this, I realized, you know what? Like, I actually know how to keep customers’ attention and to bring them in and to bring them on a journey with brands, with companies, with online businesses, offline businesses, with products, with services, with you name it and what we do is we help businesses today create deeper engagement and focus with their clients and build deeper relationships by helping them really craft the journey that customers go on with them. And it results in much bigger businesses. It helps you. It is a magical formula that helps you scale your business. And so that’s what the Kinetic Customer Formula really is. It’s all those years of experience kind of packed into one nice little package. [3:30]
Nancy Calabrese: So, when you begin working with a company, how long does it take for the light bulb to go off?
Jason Friedman: For their light bulb to go off or their customers light bulb to go off?
Nancy Calabrese: Well, we could do both, but I have a fair life both.
Jason Friedman: There’s a lot of light bulbs that go off, right? Because what ends up happening is the first light bulb that really goes off is the realization that we as businesses make it hard for our customers to do business with us. And when you start to understand what I mean by that and how despite our efforts to make it better for our customers, oftentimes we’ve created so many friction points, so many obstacles in their journey because we’re looking at it through our perspective as the business, right? And so, the first thing I do is have them really learn how to shift their perspective and understand the business from the customer’s point of view. And when you do that, you start to realize, oh God, this is like, I wouldn’t want to be my customer in a lot of ways. And so that first kind of light bulb that goes off and it’s an emotional light bulb, right? Some people have, you know, they feel bad because they done everything that they’ve done, all their decisions have been to help the customers. And yet in spite of that, they have some of these challenges, right? So that’s the first light bulb. The second light bulb is this light bulb where people start to understand, well, okay, I get it. Like we can take out the friction, but like I still have like all this competition and I’m spending all this money on ads and all my clients, I’m still not getting as many people in. I’m still not optimized. And the second light bulb is that we spend all our energy focusing on how to get strangers to come to our business and talk to us, and very little of our energy money resources on helping the people who said yes to us get those results. And so now I help them shift their focus to the other side of the funnel, if you will. So, we flip the funnel. And my whole premise is that when we really focus on creating success, creating results for our customers, regardless of what kind of business you have. When that becomes our focus and our energy flows there, every dollar that we spend on the front end of our funnel, every dollar that we spend bringing people in, result in an exponential return. So, it makes more sense to invest in the front end once you’ve solved this other piece. And most businesses kind of do it backwards, right? So yeah, like those are the first two big light bulbs that blow up for people. And then from there, we go we go further, right? And there’s lots of light bulbs along the journey, but once they kind of have those epiphanies and they kind of have faith that, whoa, yeah, this process is going to help me, it makes sense, then all sorts of things start to happen. We start to take massive action. [6:23]
Nancy Calabrese: Wow, huh. You know, I know that you’re all about obsessing over your customer’s success, and you do a lot of mixing with storytelling and the science of human behavior. Can you explain that in more detail?
Jason Friedman: Yeah, sure. I mean, so here’s the thing. Like, let’s take someone that has like an online business, for example, right? So, someone comes to your business and there, they watch your sales video or whatever your presentation is and they’re like, yeah, this sounds pretty good. I’m in, I’m going to do this, right? That in and of itself is not a commitment. It’s an intention, right? And we think, oh yeah, they said, yeah, they’re committed to it, but they’re not. They had an intention, and they took a step. And so, then what happens is the psychology comes in, right? There’s Byers Remorse. They’re like, huh, you know what? I probably, maybe, I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Or, you know, I’ve done this before, I’ve tried something in the past and it didn’t work. This is going to be the same again. And so all of these normal reptilian brain thoughts come into our heads and these cognitive biases stop us from making progress. And so like, when we start to look at what are the stories that we need to tell, how do we show people that this is going to be a different experience, right? How do we get them to forget about all that stuff, like when they come into the theater, and just be present and be part of that story, and go on the journey with us? How do they have faith and trust us? And so that begins by that very first moment, realizing we must get their commitment and we must earn their commitment, right? And so, the onboarding part, like most people think onboarding is one and done. And we believe that onboarding is this ongoing thing. We think, say to people, always be onboarding, right? And onboarding to me is how we help people move from one type of relationship to the next part of, like every transition and relationship is an opportunity for onboarding. And so, when they go from stranger to customer, there’s an onboarding moment when they go from like the beginning of their journey as a customer to maybe the next level where it’s like a whole different part of engagement, that’s an opportunity to onboard people. And so, it’s in those moments that we must gain that trust and that commitment. And we do it by setting and managing expectations by providing enough information in bite sized chunks that doesn’t overwhelm people. Right. [9:05]
Nancy Calabrese: Well.
Jason Friedman: What I see, I see so many business owners do, Nancy, is that they come in and they just say, oh, I want to give them all the stuff they need so that they have everything. And so, they give them this, like they purchase that online course and they get this email of death. And it’s like, oh my God, there’s four billion things I have to do. And that’s when you’re like, I don’t have time for this. I shouldn’t have bought this. Oh, what was I thinking? Right? [9:30]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. I totally agree with you. I totally. Too much information is a turn off.
Jason Friedman: Yeah, and we need to know them. So again, using our theater background, the next epiphany that we have people kind of go through is really to understand their quote avatar, their ideal customers or their personas, whatever word you use, how do we help them understand them on a deeper level? And so, we use it in a way that people do in theater, right? So, imagine that you’re Matthew McConaughey or Robert De Niro, and you’re playing this character in a film. How do you get into character? So that when you’re on stage, everything about your isms, your mannerisms, your breath, your vocal, your whole backstory is all so believable that when we’re watching the show, people are like, oh yeah, like he’s totally that guy. It’s not Matthew McCona anymore, he’s this guy. And so, if you can understand your customers that deeply, you can start to provide the journey that they need to go on and that they feel safe and comfortable going on, because you understand them. And most businesses, we know such superficial information about our customers, when we start to go into this kind of a way to look at it, we uncover so much more. And that’s where we start to realize, oh, you know what? I can look at the business through their lens. I get them now. In fact, most companies that we work with, Nancy, they say to me, Jason, you’re a great I used to hate some of my customers. I have fallen in love with them. I understand them better and they appreciate me more because they know they feel understood, right? And that changes the entire dynamic. Always been there. Yeah. [11:16]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. Wow. I think that’s a great idea. Yeah. Oh my God. So, I mean, I don’t know if we’ve kind of covered it, but do you have a particular unique idea that is different and sets you apart?
Jason Friedman: I mean, I think many of our ideas set us apart. But again, this idea of, like, what is an ideal result for your customer? So, for example, like, if I’m a diet business, right? I’m teaching people about weight loss, for example, right? I might think, oh, like, the ideal result is that they lose 20 pounds, right? Well, that is not the ideal result. The ideal result is more around how that customer feels about their journey, right? So, if I, like 20 pounds is the way we get them the result, but the result is that they feel more confident in their skin, that they feel like instead of sitting on the TV watching Netflix alone on a Saturday night, they’re calling friends and going out. And like when they walk in their closet, they feel good about the clothes that they can put on. They feel confident. That’s the ideal result. And so, when we start to teach people about how to really think about the results, It’s the idea of, we call it the R4, right? We want, the result is that we want people to rave about the journey they just had with you. We want people to renew their memberships or their subscriptions with you because they would feel lost if they weren’t part of that community. We want them to return to buy more products, the next product, the next level of products from you because they feel so moved by what’s happened that they just can’t help but want more. And ideally, the last part is that they recruit others to come work in your business because they feel this compulsion that they want other people to come in. They want to help people get what they got from you because it was so outstanding. And so, when you really think about the result that way, you start to do what we call write an ideal customer script, right? I want you to script the perfect testimonial that your customer would say because most businesses think, yeah, I’ve got great testimonials. It’s like, oh, I lost 20 pounds, it was awesome. That’s not a great testimony. The testimonial I just shared about like my life; I love me again. I go in my closet, and I put on clothes, and I feel good. I go out instead of sitting at home alone. I have never felt so confident in my life. That’s a testimonial that’s going to get someone to go by from you. And when I had that experience, if I had that experience, I’m telling everybody I know, because it was transformational. And so, what I want people to do is to reverse engineer everything that happens so that people, like a conveyor belt, like an assembly line, they have that same experience. And in theater, like when I was, I toured on the road with big Broadway shows like Jesus Christ Superstar, Fiddler on the Roof, Man of La Mancha, guess what? Every single night with a completely different audience, they laughed at the exact same moment. Every single night with the completely different audience, every single different city doesn’t matter. They had the same applause. They did the same things at the same time because it was scripted. It was practiced. It was engineered to take them on that journey. And most of them leave that to chance in our businesses. So, when you go through our program, you learn a system. You build an operating system for your business that delivers delighted customers who bring other people to your business over and over again. You’ve created this recruiting system of like, this crazy like word of mouth and this energy from people that they have to tell other people about your business. So then when you start doing all the other sales functions, all the things that you were doing to bring people in, now you know that you’re gonna actually get big results and they’re gonna convert. And those dollars that you spend on marketing, the things that you start marketing, are the success stories of your other clients. And that’s how you win. And so, we scale businesses by helping them do this over and over again. And it’s one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done in my life. [15:31]
Nancy Calabrese: Do you have a… I could hear your passion about it. Do you target a certain industry? Are you industry agnostic?
Jason Friedman: Sadly, most industries think, well, but it won’t work in my business, right? You’ve been down this road before, right? It doesn’t matter. If you have customers in your business, this will help you, right? It really doesn’t matter. And Nancy, the crazy thing about this, the strategic byproduct is, and well, it’s that your employees end up loving their job more. Your employees, your culture in your business transforms you start to attract more right fit employees because they want to be part of the movement you’ve created. And so, some people come to us just to do this exact same formula just for the inside of their business because it’s the same formula, we do it the same way. And so, it’s just a powerful, powerful tool that we’ve spent years just kind of making better and making better. And it just makes sense. Like if you have clients who love you, they’re going to tell other people and that’s what we all want. Like nobody, I’ve never spoken to a single person that said to me, I don’t care if my clients like my product or not, you know? And if they do, if they are those people, it’s like, look, I just want the $10, if I get some returns, I don’t care, that’s not my client. They’re never going to buy my product and I don’t want them to, right? I want their competition to beat them because they’re doing good things to help people. Right, and that’s what we want to do. [17:00]
Nancy Calabrese: Something that’s true that almost nobody agrees with you on.
Jason Friedman: That’s a great question. So here’s the, well, I’m going to tell you something that nobody agrees with me on at first. Okay? And here’s what it is. Overdelivery is going to kill your business. And they’re like, wait, what? When you overdeliver all the time, under promise, overdeliver. When it’s like, I’m going to always overdeliver. Like I always overdeliver my clients. They love me. I promise you that it will kill your business. And here’s why. Because the world needs contrast. The only way we know if something is good is if we had something bad. We must have a comparison. And if everything you do is a 10, it’s just expected. It’s no longer over delivery. So, what you’ve created by always over delivering is you’ve created an expectation of over delivery. So, all you can do is fail when you can’t think of another idea to do or you don’t have any more money to keep spending, to keep up leveling. And so, what we teach people to do is what we call strategic over delivery. Pick key moments that you wanna go a little bit above that are most meaningful to those customers. And so, when you get into character and you know who those customers are, you’ll know what moments matter the most. And that’s where we get that reward of an over delivery. And so, what you do is you set and manage expectations. And when you do what you say, just do what you say, you’re better than most businesses out there today. And you’ve built trust. And then when you pick key moments to go a little bit above and beyond, and maybe you’re always at a five, you go to a seven. Sometimes you go to an eight. Maybe you do an occasional 10. They will appreciate it. They will see it as over delivery and they will thank you, but it won’t build this expectation that that’s what you have to do all the time, and they will still love you. They’ll actually love you more. So that’s the one that I fight with people on initially, and then they finally say, you know what? That’s actually pretty smart. [19:15]
Nancy Calabrese: I love it. Yeah. I love it. Hey, I can’t believe we’re up in time already. What is the one takeaway you want to leave the audience with?
Jason Friedman: Yeah, like the big the big aha, like if you take nothing else away, focus on the experience you’re creating for your customers. Take a look at it through their eyes. Shop your experience and stop making it hard for people to do business with you. [19:38]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. I love it. I know you have the gift for the audience, right?
Jason Friedman: Yeah, I do. I know we’re living on time, and so I’m not going to tell you what it is, but I’m gonna tell you this. I have a PDF that will take you less than 10 minutes to go through. It’s totally free, no obligations to do anything further beyond that, and you can’t get it if you just go to my main website at cxformula.com. The only way you can get it is if you go to gift, g-i-f-t dot cxformula.com slash conversational dash selling and I’m telling you less than 10 minutes. And it’s an idea, it’s a big idea, like I shared with over delivery. It’s a bigger idea than that, with some actionable ways you can start using it, that will literally change your business. You got nothing to lose. [20:23]
Nancy Calabrese: Love it. Oh my God. You’re fabulous. I really enjoyed our discussion and everyone out there, he knows what he’s doing. So, for all of us or all of you out there that have customers and could really benefit from getting involved with your customers to the degree that Jason can teach you, I urge that you call. How can they reach you, Jason? Is LinkedIn profile, phone number?
Jason Friedman: You can definitely hit me up on LinkedIn if you want. It’s linkedin.com slash in slash Jason D Friedman. You can hit us up at my website, cxformula.com. There’s a contact us information. It’s got our phone number, all that on there. So yeah, definitely reach out. Love to chat with anybody. [21:09]
Nancy Calabrese: Great. Listen, again, everyone out there, take advantage of Jason’s generous offer and make it an awesome sales day. See you next time. [21:22]
