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:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/royosing/
- BE DiFFERENT or be dead: https://www.bedifferentorbedead.com/
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:
- Twitter:https://twitter.com/oneofakindsales
- Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/One-Of-A-Kind-Sales-304978633264832/
- Website:https://oneofakindsales.com
- Phone: 908-879-2911
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ncalabrese/
- Email: leads@oneofakindsales.com
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]
