Special Guest Frank Gustafson

0:04 Thank you for joining us on the Winning It Selling Podcast. I'm Bill Hellkamp of Reach Development Systems, and what's me as Professor Scott Plum of the Minnesota Sales Institute. We create fresh starts at different times of the year. For some, it may be January 1st, for others, it may be the day after Labor Day. Regardless of when, a plan and process with passion are all necessary. Whether you're mapping out your career goals, focus on personal growth, or chasing that fitness milestone, stay tuned as we explore common setbacks, the power of accountability, and how to stay motivated and resilient when challenged.

0:38 Get ready to take your goal-setting game to the next level, as Bill and I welcome sales expert Frank Gossipsen to prepare for the new year by discussing goal-setting and other venerable valuables on Episode 648 of the Winning It Selling Podcast. So as usual, when we have a guest Scott, no book club, but next week we're going to be doing the one thing. We're going to start that out. The one thing by Gary Keller. We'll do chapters 1 and 2.

1:11 Probably look at the intro as well. So go out and buy your copy and start reading. Don't let us do all the work. I'm really looking forward to that. Easy chapters, folks. Easy chapters. So to get another professional viewpoint, let's listen to a sales tip by Anthony. Enjoy and learn from the sales tip from Anthony by Anthony Enorino, a highly respected international speaker, best-selling author, entrepreneur and sales leader.

1:37 Hey, it's Anthony Enorino. I was raised by a single mom who did a great job taking care of me. We didn't have a lot of money. We did the best that we could at that particular time. And so I am money focused because I didn't have any when I was young. So I want to tell you, if you want to make more money in sales, I can help you do this. So I'm going to give you a number of things that you could do to improve your ability to create an income for you and your family.

2:08 So the first thing I would tell you is don't go after a hot new market with high demand. I mean, I know that it looks sexy and you think it's going to be great. It's a fad. It will go away. And anybody that's got a blue ocean where they think that they are the only ones that can do something, they only need to wait about 15 minutes and that will go away. Here's the things that I would tell you to do. When you get a job, make sure you've got unlimited commissions.

2:34 That is the first thing that you need to do. The second thing that you need to do, stay in your current industry. If you move industries, you have to learn the sales conversation all over again and that's going to take time and effort from you. You want to ensure you have the ability to go after large clients and you also need to improve your sales effectiveness. You should always be using a modern sales methodology in today's days and you should build lifelong relationships with your clients if you want to make more money.

3:07 Avoid retention problems. So even if you have an operation team and they do this work, you do it with them and make sure that your client is going to stay with you for life. See me at the salesblog.com or come out and say hello at LinkedIn. See you soon. His goal is to say don't get yourself involved in too many things. Pick an industry, get good at it, don't keep changing industries, don't keep changing businesses because you can't build up an expertise if you keep changing businesses.

3:41 And then you can build the same client relationships no matter where you go. Great advice. I think there's a chapter in thinking real rich called specialized knowledge and once you learn that, then you're able to have something that's valuable to other people. We're so grateful to have Frank Gustafson on the show with us. Frank is the founder of strategic training partners, which focuses on sales performance improvement.

4:01 Frank is a veteran sales trainer coach and entrepreneur with over 35 years of sales and sales leadership experience. His work with business owners, sea level executives and sales teams, helping them transform sales strategies into scalable, predictable, revenue engines. Passionate about driving lasting success. Frank combines expert coaching with proven methods on behavior change, skill development and leadership growth. His entrepreneurial spirit and deep industry knowledge.

4:29 Make him a trusted advisor for professionals, striving to excel in competitive markets. Frank's motto is nobody ever got fired by improving sales performance. Frank. Frank, welcome to the show. That's a great intro. Thank you. Bill, thank you guys so much. I appreciate the opportunity to be here with you. I'm honored. I'm looking forward to our conversation. Frank and I were just talking before the show. We met probably about 15 years ago and just have stayed in touch and we have a lot of similar values and methodologies.

4:59 And I think we're really going to have a great, great topic. So one of the topics goal setting. Frank, how do you describe your perspective of goal setting, first of all? So goal setting has always been a challenge to me. My personality, hi, Dehi. I kind of have traditionally been a ready fire aim guy. And things sometimes turn out, sometimes don't. Getting into really striving to stay with a methodology and understanding the importance of setting goals, I think has been maybe a more recent phenomenon with me, probably within the last.

5:38 I don't know, 10, 12 years, something like that. But I think that a good, effective goal setting process sets people apart. It sets the achievers apart from the non achievers, honestly. You know, it's funny to talk about ready fire aim. I end up working with some partners for a short period of time and they were ready. Let's work on our website and it's like, why don't you talk to somebody? See what happens, you know?

6:10 So I think finding that balance between aiming all the time and sometimes pulling the trigger and then resetting those goals a little bit is always important, figuring out what you're going to be able to accomplish, but salespeople, Frank, they like to get into the action step. into the action step. And for them to sit down and really set those goals is difficult. Why do you think it's important for salespeople in particular to spend some time setting goals?

6:39 We're coming into the first of the year. Many, many companies have the calendar year. So it's time to get going on this. Well, you know, so I, when you guys reach out to me and say, Hey, let's talk about this. I pulled out six kind of key points to goal setting. There's probably a lot more, but I think that who was a Jim Rohn that said, Hey, if you want to get good at anything, you need to be pretty good at about a half dozen things. And he iterates that over and over and over. So I think that, you know, that why salespeople need to have a clear purpose behind their sales goals really kind of digs in and dives into that first piece, which is you've got to have a clear vision and a clear purpose. And I think that what that does is

7:32 that helps keep salespeople motivated and persistent, especially in times when sales cycles are tough. You know, personal motivation pays dividends. So an example might be you've got a sales goal of a million dollars, knowing what knowing that achieving that goal in earning maybe a promotion or providing for your family, it really adds meaning beyond just hitting the number. And I think that probably the, you know, some of the there's some there's some strategies around that. And I like to start with a long term goal, long term vision, a long term thought around that, five years, and then say, okay, for that to be true in five years, what needs to be true in

8:24 three years, and then for that to for that to come to fruition, what needs to be true in a year, and then a quarter, and then a month, and then a week, and then you can back that down to what do I need to do today? And I think that what that does is that ultimately, as it aligns, it keeps that clear vision and that ultimate, ultimate purpose in the forefront. Is this getting into begin with why, you know, why do people do this, the motivation?

8:51 Yeah, yeah, and I think I would certainly want to talk about that here in just a little bit, but but it certainly does tie into that. So, so for me, ultimately, it keeps me as a seller, knowing what's the most important thing right now to achieve that that long term vision, that long term goal. I think that sales coaching, possibly sales leadership, one of the most difficult jobs in the building, but sales coaching around this question, I think is important.

9:29 A good question for sales coaches, for sales leaders to coach their folks is, hey, what what personal purpose drives you to perform your best in sales? Right. Thoughts on that? Well, I think one of the things we always have to look at is it seems that

9:49 so many organizations set their goals for people. Right. Okay, you're going to do you did a million last year, you're going to do a million 100,000 a year, maybe a 10% rise in that goal. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with pushing people to that next level. But what if that salesperson doesn't buy into that? They think, man, I really had to bust my hump to get to a million. And how am I going to find where am I going to find that extra 100,000? We're not changing anything. We don't have new product. I don't have a new way to sell. So what can we do? How can we rectify or rationalize a situation where the company's got goals? But maybe the salesperson doesn't always buy into those

10:27 goals. So I've got a good goal setting process is going to is going to tie what I want as the sales person in life to how does that how does that tie into the company winning as well? And you're kind of reading ahead in my playbook here, because I'm going to I want to talk about that here just a little bit as well, Bill. Thanks for the question. And that kind of gets to getting into the specific actionable oriented type of goals, Frank. And we've heard the term just sell more just go out there and sell more. Yeah, go get them tiger. Yeah, where do you begin with something like that? So, why should salespeople set specific targets rather than just aiming to sell more?

11:11 So, so I think that that, you know, my answer to that really is that specific goal gives a sales person a clear target. So the goal might be close five deals worth 50 grand apiece, you know, by the end of the quarter. But that's is that actionable? That's not really actionable.

11:34 Reven is a lagging indicator. So what's going to happen to make those five deals that 50k come true? And I think that the kind of the process around that getting super specific and aiming at what really matters is the old acronym. And we've all heard it a million times. And I'm going to I'm just going to parrot it again today. And it's the smart or smarter goals. So, so Bill is kind of ties in this specific clearly defined with a clear why, because if you know why the how, you know, Simon Cinek says if you understand the why the how becomes more clear. So I think it's got to be clearly defined with a clear why it's got to be measurable. The M is measurable. If you can't measure

12:22 it, you can't manage it. You know, how would you know if you've achieved anything if it's not being measured and then achievable? It's got to be real. Consider the time, the energy, the tools, the skills that it takes to achieve a goal. So it's got to be achievable. I am never going to play and it's probably tried and true and a little bit cliche and tried, but I'm never going to play in the NBA. I just turned 60 and I've got a vertical jump of about three inches and I'm just it's like they're so it's not a roll it's not an achievable goal. Right. And then I think it's got to be relevant. Does it really align with your overall objectives and your purpose and your vision?

13:04 And if it does, I think that that makes goal goal achievement more realistic. It's got to be time bound. A goal without a deadline is really just a wish. You got to be specific about when you want to achieve something. And then we add E on there for evaluated. I think you've got to have regular check-ins. You've got to evaluate your process, your progress. What is what is the performance today that telling you are you getting to where you need to be? And then we tack an R on there and R could be readjusted. If you're off track, adjust your tactics or your timeline if necessary and then R could also be reward. You got to celebrate achievements to maintain motivation.

13:51 Yeah, I think you have to look at them a lot too. You have to that reviewing all the time. How where am I today? I think a lot of people set those goals, put them someplace and don't look at them. And it's that reviewing of those goals that's going to help you to reevaluate what's going on. So I think that putting that R on the end there. I also think I want to go back to your statement because I think it's very important. Revenue is a lagging indicator. And I think too many people only set their goals in the revenue area. Okay, do XYZ. And they don't look at the daily habits and the things that we should be doing. And Scott and I talk about the activities. What

14:27 activities do you need to do to achieve this goal? That goal will happen if I'm doing the activities, what's your thoughts on the daily activities, the daily habits? What is a salesperson's best day? What should it look like? Well, and I think that that's based on what their ultimate vision and what their ultimate goal is. And we talk a little bit about in Santa, we talk about having a behavioral cookbook and that behavior. And that's in another point that I want to talk about. But we'll talk about it briefly now. But those behaviors, those actionable items are the only thing that you can't control. And we'll talk here in just a second about how to kind of back

15:07 down from what you want to achieve, back that down to what are the behaviors and what are the techniques that you've got to do today. Around this specific and actionable goals, I think that a lot of the, you say the salespeople, we just set those aside. So what is our,

15:30 what does a sales leadership do? How do we coach around that? One of the questions that I think is a good one here is, you know, can you share with me a time when setting a specific sales goal helped you achieve success? Bringing those things back to the forefront helps us keep them out. They're not just stuck away somewhere. Right. That association of accomplishment is transferable into the future. When we get into those situations, we know we've accomplished it. We know that it's possible and we repeat it. So getting into the daily habits of the salespeople seems to be kind of the focus when it comes to those leading indicators is to focus on healthy habits.

16:13 Yeah, I think so. And Bill, this is kind of where you were, where you were getting to, you know, good habits like making prospecting calls every morning or sending follow up emails or

16:23 networking or LinkedIn outreach, whatever, whatever it takes to accomplish what you want to accomplish, the key is consistency. We talk about this behavioral cookbook and, you know, you think about a cookbook. What is a cookbook? You want to make something. You want to create something. You want to achieve something. There are, there are elements and there are ingredients that go into creating whatever you're going to create. And you're going to make a cake. You look at the cookbook and it says, you need this, you need this, you need this, and how much of each of those you need and what order you put them in and then how you mix them together and then how long you bake them and

17:02 and and what temperature, all that's in a cookbook. Why can't you do the same thing for sales? So let's take a look at maybe what a cookbook creation might look like. The goal is to create a million dollars in sales, right? So to do that, we need to know what our average deal size is, right? So we know what our average deal size is. How many proposals do we need to put out, you know, look back at your data. How many proposals you need to put out to get one deal?

17:34 How many demos do you need to do if you do demos to write one proposal? How many discovery calls to get a demo? How many dials to get a discovery call? The only leading indicator there was the dial, right? So that's behavioral, that's specific and you've got to make that constant and consistent. So you think about what goes in, it depends on what you want to achieve. So think about a cup of sugar and a cup of salt. They look the same. They have a very different result, right? Think about 30 minutes in an oven versus 30 minutes in a microwave. Both of them are ovens, but you get a drastically different result. So whatever those right actions or right behaviors are,

18:22 do those, build momentum and that leads to success over time. One of the things that you probably heard, we're going to be doing the one thing and that's what Gary Keller talks about is what is the one thing that I can do to start the chain reaction of happening and he uses the image of a domino where he's got a very small domino, but that will knock down a domino 50% bigger than it and that would not. And by the time you've knocked down seven dominoes, you've gone from something that's one ounce to something that's 20 pounds. And that's what you're talking about, right? Maybe for you, it's the phone call. And if you skip that domino, if you skip that one thing, you just won't have enough chain reactions happening. I could

19:04 say, oh, my one thing is I want to meet with customers. But that's too far down the path, isn't it? It is. What do you have to do to actually meet with a prospective customer that is in your

19:20 ideal client profile? There's some stuff that has to happen before you can do that. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just skip to that? So the coaching question around this might be something like, hey, what's the one sales habit that has made the biggest difference in your sales career? Well, Raymond, start there. Wow, it's a great question. Sometimes when those sales people have sales managers, sales managers kind of like hold them accountable. I don't know if sales people really love the term accountability, but how can sales people use accountability to improve their performance? So you're 100% right. I have never been a huge fan of accountability until

20:08 well, I wasn't until I got into sales leadership. Then I realized, hey, we need some accountability around these, around these, these, these activities and these goals. And I think that that, that if you get honest with yourself as salespeople, you've got to really understand that accountability is absolutely critical. And I think that we as salespeople can improve our accountability by maybe sharing our goals with a mentor or a manager or a team member. Or, you know, I share the goals that I'm okay being held accountable with. I'll share those with my wife of 35 years. The ones that I really don't want her to hold me accountable with, I probably won't share them. So, you know,

20:52 we've got little, little tricks that we play in ourselves. I think that the school of thought here is really is around sharing those goals with somebody that can have a positive impact on their achievement. And then regular check-ins, constructive feedback help keep you focused and motivated as a salespeople. The gacha, and we taught, we alluded to this a little bit, but the gacha here is the goal can't be the leader's goal. Salespeople will knock down walls to achieve their goals.

21:26 Other people's goals? Not so much maybe. So accountability can't be forced. It's got to be permission-based accountability. So, are there any other roadblocks or I guess, are there any stumbling blocks that you would see that we need to be careful of when choosing that accountability partner? You know, that's a good question, Bill. And my experience has always been that if somebody asks a question, they probably have a really good answer for it. So, I'm going to defer. Oh, no, that's almost cheating. But I think, you know, I've seen people in the past pick accountability partners that don't really have your best interest in mind. I think that's really key

22:12 is that they want you to succeed too. And that's not always your boss. You know, they may have their own own motivation. So finding that person, you know, obviously you've used your wife as an example. And we would hope that our spouse would have our best interest in mind and be willing and open to hold us accountable to those things. So I would just caution people to be careful that the person they choose really wants them to succeed and isn't going to throw fake barriers in their way.

22:45 So obviously my wife is an accountability partner for me. I've got another accountability partner. And then I've got a co-op that helps hold me accountable as well. But my good buddy, Kim Pillar, who's in the same business, has been my accountability partner for over five years now. And we speak on a weekly basis. And we talk about where we're at and what our goals are and where we're, you know, what our achievement is. And we ask each other questions and maybe if it's permission based, we can coach each other a little bit.

23:13 So it's got to be somebody that, like you said, has your best interest in mind. And then we just need to remember as somebody reaches out to us and ask us to help them be accountable,

23:27 unwanted feedback is never helpful. There's always going to be pushback. Yeah, I've never really found constructive criticism to ever be constructive. Criticism is by its nature destructive. And I think we always find that sometimes when we get too tough on people, they tend to wilt instead of grow. So be careful of that. There's a very important topic in this discussion of accountability. And Frank said it is the whose number is it? Is it the salesperson's number or is it the management's number?

23:58 And I see this in leadership's challenge, you know, being challenged by the sales team and vice versa is sales leadership has been sort of charged with increasing revenue, which means salespeople have to increase revenue. So they have to do more. And a salesperson can very comfortably, in some cases, say, well, I sold a million dollars last year, I'm going to sell a million dollars again next year. So don't expect anything more from me. Well, that's just not the way it works.

24:21 And sometimes with the smart goals, when it comes to be attainable or realistic, people set kind of a low number because it's attainable. And it's realistic. And it's like, but my boss wants 10% more. So Frank, any advice for, and I don't have an answer. So I'm asking you a question. Don't turn it on me. What advice do you have for sales manager that says, I need to get more revenue out of my sales team. So I need them to pick a higher number than they did last year. So I think it, I think it, it, it goes back to what is, what is their personal goal? What do they want to achieve in life? And look, honestly, I mean, I've got clients that, for larger companies that have told me, I'm not allowed to ask those questions and

25:05 my salespeople. And I said, well, then we've got an issue. We've got, we've got a problem. But if if Scott, if you know, as my sales leader, you know that I need to achieve a million dollars

25:16 in sales this year, or the company's not going to hit its goal, and I come back to you and I say, my goal is 500 grand. And here's why, because I want to do, this is what I want to do in life. And 500 grand in sales revenue will get me there. And that's what I'm motivated by. Sometimes personal goals are not aligned with what we need to, with with reality, what we need to have happen.

25:45 And maybe it's time to have the discussion. Or maybe it's time to, you know, set somebody free to go and achieve their 500 grand in another place and achieve their goal somewhere else. Because we're, we really need more than that. But those, those need to align. So, one, one good place to start maybe is this coaching question. Hey, have you ever worked with someone who helped hold you accountable and helped you hit your targets? No, but I've had people that lowered over me. Well, what if it, what if it didn't look like that? How could we do that? How could we make that happen? Right. I think one of the challenges that we've seen is that too many

26:29 sales managers are sitting behind their computers looking at metrics. And they're not looking at people that are not having this kind of a conversation that says, you know, what, what, what barriers, what's getting in your way? They just say, you know, go out and work harder. Go get them tiger. Let's do more. And they don't really have any way to help them or reason that's going to help me to do more. Well, Bill, you and I know 100% we know why that happens because because we need all of a sudden we had a vacancy in sales leadership. And we've got this amazing sales person over here who has just filled it for us for the last five, seven years. And we say, well, hey, wouldn't it be a great idea to

27:10 promote them into sales leadership? And and and now what we've done is we've created a conundrum because we've lost a great salesperson. And we've gained and we haven't trained a sales manager who is mediocre at best. And I think I'm being generous there. Most sales people, most sales leaders out there today in the world have not been trained on how to do these things. They don't know how to coach. They sit behind a computer, look at the metrics and they see people as numbers. And they don't get it.

27:43 I use baseball as a metaphor for for sales in a lot of cases and and business. And one of the things that I see is that the the phenom, the Kirby pockets, they don't become good coaches because they really don't know why they're good. And they never had to struggle to get better. I think it's your middle line salesperson who had to really bust his hump or her hump to make things happen and learn how to be a good salesperson that that makes a better sales manager because they understand what it takes. And the the natural, the great salesperson, they don't want to be coaching and mentoring anybody. They want to go out and say, I did just go do what I did, Bill.

28:24 Well, there was an interview at Kirby pocket did. They said, how can you hit the ball so well, it's just that big, man. It's just that big. You just hit it. It's like great coaching advice, Kirby, but nobody sees it big and slow like you do. So I think that's really important. So we're kind of getting into this thought of these tough situations where salespeople, they're going to get demotivated. You're going to have low sales. You're going to you're not going to hit your quota some quarter.

28:49 What do we do for salespeople? How do they use this goal setting process to deal with rejection, slow sales periods, the barriers that they're going to ultimately deal with? So we talk a lot about behaviors, attitudes and techniques that go into sales success. And this is an attitude really. Salespeople need to figure out how to see these challenges as learning experience. As John Maxwell said, you either win or you learn. It sounds easy, right?

29:21 If a deal fails, how do you analyze what went wrong? How do you adjust your approach? How do you make the change and move forward? And in the grand scheme of things, deals fail. They were probably poorly qualified or maybe I as a salesperson got emotionally involved in the outcome and I put pressure, I applied pressure. So I think that this really is it's an attitude and it's probably one of the resilience piece of this.

30:03 Getting through these obstacles is probably one of the most difficult thing for salespeople. Because look, if you haven't failed, you're probably not really in sales in order to take you haven't tried enough. Well, I think too, if you haven't learned to deal with rejection in sales by the time you're doing bigger deals, you're in the wrong program. So you can't be, you can't have that soft heart and deal with all the rejection and the issues you have to deal with because it's get up today and do it again. So we've got a rule that the prospect is the only one that is allowed to get emotionally involved in the outcome.

30:47 Well, yeah, we did an episode while back on debriefing a sales call, Frank. And as Bill and I were preparing for that, we realized that there's not a lot of debriefing on sales calls. And I think about when it comes to making a goal, you need to be able to review some of your behaviors and then you need to do the map of them all where you right now. And you need to debrief sales calls to be able to figure out what skills you need to learn if you still want to achieve the same goals or sometimes you need to review your goals and go up and down accordingly. So how do you suggest people review or adjust accordingly from their behavior? So I think you've got to be somewhat

31:30 flexible, right? Things are always changing in a deal in sales in general, things are always changing. Market conditions change. Look at the changes we've had over the last several years. So look at COVID. Look at what happened there. There's a lot of things that change. Customer needs change. Competition changes. There's a million other things that change. So I think that reviewing these goals really helps salespeople stay focused, helps them recalibrate, helps them set new targets when they're needed. But keeping those goals in front of you is key and then be willing.

32:10 And this is again, this is another attitude. You've got to be willing to pivot. It's easier when you stay focused on the process, when you stay focused on the behaviors on the activities to pivot. Because these ultimately are the only things that we can control. Exactly as we kind of wrap it up today, Frank, thanks for being with us. I have a question. That was great. All of our guests. And that is who or what person author, person book has had the greatest impact on your life or career? Man, a lot of them. I love all the John Maxwell stuff.

32:42 I'm a big fan of just the attitude of Zig Ziglar. And I think that Nate Nesarela's book, Selling With has probably changed my mindset over the last year. It's a relatively new book. Follow him on LinkedIn, read his book. I don't have a dog in the hunt. There's no commission coming my way at all. But it's changed my thoughts. One of the things that he talks about is that our prospects are having conversations about us without us. How do we help them create that narrative when they're having those conversations about us without us? And that's just one of a million things he's got in that amazing book. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Well, this has been a great,

33:27 great interview. Thanks so much. You know, I just can't stress enough how important it is to set some goals. This is a great time of year to do it. We're all thinking about it and you're certainly going to hear about it. So thanks a lot, Frank. It's a pleasure to meet you. My pleasure brother. For Frank's resources, we'll have this on the show page, but it's go.santler.com STP. We'll put that link up there. We'll close out with our golden nugget. This is from Warren Buffett. He's made a little couple of bucks in his life. Yes. Without passion, you don't have energy. Without energy, you have nothing. And that's what salespeople sometimes have to do is just put their own physical

34:06 energy into something, make a decision and push forward toward it. And I think goal setting really helps you make that decision on a daily basis. Definitely. Definitely in passion. This is the fuel that pushes that along. So everything we talked about will be at winning at selling.com. This is episode 648. Next week, we're going to start the one thing by Gary Keller, chapters 1, 2, maybe it's been a little time in the intro. Our topic, five ways to jump start the new year for you sales people. Please subscribe and share the podcast with your colleagues on your social media. This is episode 648. Go out and get better one skill at a time. Joyful selling.