The Weekly Sales Meeting

0:04 Thank you for joining us on the Winning It Selling Podcast on Professor Scott Plum of the Minnesota Sales Institute and with me is Bill Hellkamp of Rich Development Systems. The weekly sales meaning can be an effective tool for your team or a boring waste of time. As a leader you choose how the meaning will go and if it will have the effect you desire. But if you leave it to chance, chances are it will suck. So grab your agendas as Scott and I discuss the weekly sales meeting and other magnificent metrics on episode 653 of the Winning It Selling Podcast.

0:37 Well I'm really looking forward to that topic Bill and I know that we've talked with our clients about their weekly sales meetings. Yes. Some of them do it and some of them don't and some of them have different formats and some of them don't have a format at all. And some sales people absolutely hate them because there's no format at all. Yeah. And there are great chance to be able to communicate a message, find out what's going on on the streets, what's happening in the trenches and for the sales people to report to management leadership what they're seeing.

1:06 Well we'll see what it should include. Yeah. You've got most of the aspects in your meeting already. Maybe not. Yeah. Yeah but that'll be a good topic. And before we get to the topic we're covering the book The One Thing by Gary Keller. We're doing chapters 5 and 6 and we're in this list of 6 lies between you and success. And we talked about everything matters equally and we talked about that before with some of our clients ranking.

1:31 Today we're going to talk about multitasking and a disciplined life. And then chapters 7, 8 and 9 are going to cover willpower is always on will call, a balanced life and big is bad. So look forward to that in the next couple of weeks. But the first chapter today of chapter 5 is on multitasking. And out of the book it says multitaskers are just lousy at everything. Multitasking is a lie. Scott doesn't agree with this.

1:57 I struggle with this. And this chapter added a little bit of clarity to it. But I think about my first job as a dishwasher at a Mr. Steak, I had the empty bus tubs, I had to spray off the dishes, I had to load the racks, I had to load the dishwasher, I had to unload the racks after the dishwasher. So I was multitasking. I was doing many things which you did them one at a time. You didn't bust the tables and wash the dishes at the same time.

2:28 That's true. You had an order of things that had to be done. Because I've done that too, I did that at my dorm. I was the bus boy and doing the dishes and you spray the stuff off. But you don't try to spray stuff off and empty the rack at the same time. You're doing things quickly from one test to the next. What about a pilot landing an aircraft? I mean they're multitasking. They got the yolk, they got the ailerons, they got the rudder, they've got it.

2:55 They're working all those things together in unison and they've practiced so that most of those things, a friend of mine says, when you're driving, you don't see the red lights in front of you and say, huh, there's some red lights in front of me. I wonder what that means. I think that means that person's going to stop. Oh, the back of their car is rising up. Maybe I should think about starting to, no, we see the red lights and we take our foot off the accelerator and we start to tap the brakes.

3:24 That all happens automatically. I don't go through this big process of thinking. Now I will think, oh my gosh, I'm still coming up on this guy too fast. I better pump these brakes. I can think just on Sunday this happened coming home from church. I'm pumping the brakes, everybody's stopping. I'm watching the car behind me. Yeah. Thinking, I hope this guy's going to stop too. How close can I get to the guy in front of me to give him as much time as possible to break?

3:52 So, many of those things and that's what he's talking about. Those happen in one side of our mind, that automatic. A pilot isn't thinking through, huh? I wonder if I should turn the yoke a little bit this way. He sees he's off center line. He changes a little things. He moves the paddles a little bit. But what he's thinking about might be watching the airspeed indicator. Might be watching the where how close they are to the ground.

4:18 And measuring all those. I think the human body is amazing. It is. We call it multitasking. I love baseball, Scott. I watch a guy pick up a ball that's a hot grounder from the outfield. Yeah. Pull his arm back and throw a ball. What? 400 feet, 350 feet. That's one way. On a line to a guy who's six feet tall within a three foot radius. He hits that target. Yeah. All automatically. He doesn't think, huh, I wonder how far I should pull my arm back.

4:52 He's thrown the ball a thousand times. His body knows exactly how to react. So when we talk about multitasking, I think you also have to separate the physical from the mental. Yeah. Yeah. So there's physical things I do when I'm driving. And then there's mental things I do when I'm driving. And he used the example in here about being on a phone call. There was a study done that of 16% of accidents were caused by people who were on phone calls.

5:26 And I have hands free. But if I get into a really active phone call and I have to think about it, all of a sudden I will pop back to my driving and go, man, I miss, you know, miss my turn. Something happened, right? And I was on auto, but I wasn't really paying attention to my driving. So I, you know, I think we flip around a lot. We do. And within the chapter, he does talk about, you know, people can actually do two or more things at once.

5:55 But we cannot do is focus on two things at once. We cannot focus on two things. We can do, but we can't focus. Okay. I will take that. I will believe that. Yes. Absolutely. There is some conscious and subconscious, you know, in this chapter, the research estimates that a worker has interrupted every 11 minutes. And that's almost a third of the day recovering from those distractions. Yeah. Because he talks about that it's at recovery time, right?

6:18 Yeah. The recovery time. Working on something difficult. Right. And then I get distracted. This is why I love working on Saturdays. This is when I do all my creative, all my preparation. You don't get emails popping in or right. I don't have people calling me. I don't feel obligated to check my email. I'm focused on doing the task without any. Sometimes I have to do that during the week, which I don't like because I want to be available when my prospects are available.

6:43 And I want to do calls when people are available to talk. And so, you know, there's, there's, and any, they talk about juggling is an illusion. So juggling isn't multitasking. It's task switching. Ah. So multitaskers experience more life reducing happiness, squelching success. Wow. Okay. But juggling isn't multitasking. It's task switching. And I believe in task switching and doing something for a short period of time than doing something else.

7:19 It's just, it's a theory that is worth contemplating multitasking, how it works and how it doesn't work, how we use it to think that we're being efficient and effective and how we don't, which we try to get things done. And the next time. Yeah. We talk about one of the things we advise people to do when they're talking about managing their time more effectively is time blocking. Yes. Which is what you're saying you do on a Saturday.

7:38 Yeah. So the time blocking is cut out those distractions and give yourself a half hour of uninterrupted time to work on something or an hour of uninterrupted time. And we advise people to put it in your calendar. I'm, you know, and you can say appointment with job with Bob or whatever you want to say. So your other compatriots don't bother you because they think you have a important phone call. But it's really right. That task you have to do is just as important as that customer phone call.

8:05 Mm hmm. Absolutely. You've talked about the difference between urgent and important many times. And often we overlook what's important to respond to what's urgent. Yeah. We just love being reactive instead of proactive. So one of the examples he gives is, is that, you know, that person in front of you and you're talking to somebody and then something distracts you. And I know when I was in retail, one of the rules I made for my team was if you're talking to a customer and the phone rings, the phone is not as important as the person who came all the way down to your store to see you, to have somebody, it might be a wrong number, might be asking for hours, might be asking if you have one particular thing that's going

8:43 to cost eight cents. Yeah. And here you got a person in front of you who's, who's asking good questions about a large purchase and you give it up for a, for something that only feels important. Right. Right. Right. So, so I think what, one of the things we have to do, and this goes back to the last chapter, that one thing. If you know what's most important to you, get that to the top of your list and say, this is what I'm going to get done today.

9:10 Right. Right. And all these other things tend to fall to the side. But as we, as we learned, and I don't think he talks about it in here, but the time management quadrant, not urgent important things are the ones that don't get done. And those, that's, that's awful. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think we've gotten it to yet, but we may. We may. We don't know. Chapter six talks about a disciplined life. And some of the book includes success is actually a short race, a spirit field by discipline long enough for a habit to kick in or take over.

9:45 Now that's not how I really look at discipline. I look at discipline as the ability to manage adversity and to never give up. I think about our military. That's perseverance. Those folks have discipline. Those Marines have discipline. And that discipline is forced upon them. Well, and it is a forced upon them. Yes, it is. It's not self-discipline. Right. But it makes them stronger and makes them more consistent. They're able to deal with adversity stronger.

10:14 They're able to win more often. But the discipline of breaking out of a routine to be able to get a habit to create a new routine is what they're really talking about. Yes. Yes. And we need just enough discipline to build a habit and long enough for it to become a routine. Yep. So what? Why does that feel controversial to you? Well, we're breaking a routine to become better. So we become more disciplined. I don't know if we're always breaking a routine.

10:44 We may be deciding on a better routine. I guess that's a breaking routine. I love sitting watch Yellowstone, land man. I mean Taylor Sheridan, incredible writer. And what I should be doing is going to the health club. Right. I'm going to get a routine sitting in my chair and now they want to discipline the brain. Okay. I guess we say we're using our time somehow. Yes. Right. We're using our time somehow and the better things that will get us somewhere, like you say, going to the health club, going for a run, going just going for a walk.

11:17 Read more. Just read more. Those are better. But for some reason they're more difficult because they're more, we have to be active. John Maxwell says, everything good is uphill. Yes. Yes. Everything you want is going to take some effort. Oh. So just a week ago, not even a week ago, five days ago. So I've had some back problems. And I know from sitting too much and some knee problems or leg weakness from not working out enough.

11:45 So I made a decision five days ago to start a new routine doing some setups, doing some D.P. Ben's just doing some more exercise routine. And I have got to fight that. So the first thing I did was I created a chart. Okay. Good. Because if you can mark it down, it starts to, it gives you something to look at and say, oh, I didn't do it today. Right. Right. But man, these first four or five days, they're hard. Yeah. Not only is the exercise hard to do, but it's hard to find the motivation.

12:14 But the interesting thing I found, let's talk about my deep knee bends. After three, the first three really hurt and are hard. Mm hmm. Then it gets going. Yeah. And the next 12 are okay. They're not easy, but they're, but they're bearable. Same with sit ups. The first five, hard to do. Yeah. The next 20, not so hard to do. Right. So it's that, it's that overcoming of that inertia, that overcoming of the realization and the knowledge that there will be some pain involved.

12:53 What I keep saying to myself on this, Scott, is if it doesn't hurt, it doesn't work. Yeah. Right. That's true. Right. So, so what you're saying that, yes, a lot easier to watch TV, but we know to ourselves we're not accomplishing anything. Right. Right. And to your point, then, you know, another thing that's in the book says, when you do the right thing, it can liberate you from having to monitor everything. Yeah. Yikes.

13:20 I don't know that I really want to let off of the controls that much and just go, oh, I don't have to monitor. I don't have to measure. I don't have to keep track of it anymore. I just do it. Yeah. Okay. And then he writes in the book that it takes 66 days to acquire a new habit. So I think we need to be able to measure it for 66 days. And if we really want to improve, I think we need to constantly measure and constantly manage it.

13:41 If I think you can let it go when it becomes the enjoyment. Okay. Yeah. Right. And reading the book is more pleasurable to you than watching Landman. Yeah. When you're watching Landman, you're going, this sucks. Even though I like this show, I would rather be doing the thing I want to do. Right. They talk about runners. I've never gotten the runners high. You know, when you get the dopamine kicks in and you're like, Oh, this is great.

14:09 You know, for me, it's always been a painful process. So so I don't know if I'll ever get there with this exercise routine that I'm working on. But then so I may have to monitor it forever. Right. Yeah. Right. And improving it constantly. Well, pushing yourself a little harder. Right. I did 25 setups this set. Now can I do 26 and pushing that one more and it's just that 1% better, you know, 1% every better every week.

14:38 And in two years, you've doubled your capacity. Right. I mean, imagine our listeners, your client base. If you get one new customer out of your existing client base or existing customer base, you've doubled your business. Ask for referral and just ask for each of your clients to give you one lead that turns into a sale or you might have to find some folks that give you two to make up for the one that didn't. But it's so easy to double your base if you just continuously ask for referrals.

15:08 So that's a new habit. Yeah. And people need that. I really liked he said, uh, focus on one habit at a time. Don't try to change yourself in 20 different areas. I heard this one guy say, go out and get better one skill at a time. I've heard that before. I've heard that before. Those are our two chapters next week. We are having a guest. So we're having Mr. Scott Wellie back on the show and he's going to surprise us with a topic.

15:37 But after that, he's a, he's a great speaker. You'll love Scott if you haven't listened to him before. Yeah. He's always got great stories, but you can start. Our listeners can start on chapter seven and eight. We'll be covering that in a couple of weeks. For more expert selling advice, listen to the sales tip from Anthony. Enjoy and learn from the sales tip from Anthony by Anthony and Reno, a highly respected international speaker, best selling author, entrepreneur and sales leader.

16:05 Hey, it's Anthony and Reno. If you have trouble getting a first meeting. It's probably because you're not offering something that's interesting enough or important enough for the client to say yes. So I would tell you to follow this rule that we call the trading value rule, which means when you ask someone for a meeting, any meeting, you have to tell them what's in it for them. I'm going to do what I do when I make a cold call and I ask somebody for a meeting and I'll let you use this to figure out how to do this for yourself.

16:40 I'm Anthony and Reno and I'm calling you today to ask you for a 25 minute executive briefing. Even if there's not a next step for me, I want to make sure that you get these trends in the implications that we believe are going to be important to you over the next six to 12 months. Even if there's not a next step for me, I'm going to make sure that you get this. What do you look like Thursday afternoon at two o'clock? Okay, just a little context on this.

17:12 If you have trouble getting a meeting, you have to give them something that they can say yes to. If you say I want to tell you about me and my company and our solution, that's not a very good trade of value. So basically it's self oriented. So instead of doing that, figure out what you can do that would be valuable enough that somebody's going to say yes, I'd love to understand what this person can share with me. See me at the sales blog.com or come out and say hello at LinkedIn.

17:43 See you soon. Well, I think that that radio station W I F M what's in it for me, baby? Yeah, self interest is really the biggest influencer of any type of persuasion technique is to always appeal to their self interest. And I think one thing that folks love and crave is they want to feel vindicated for their past behaviors and they want to be validated for their current performance. And so he talks about the executive briefing, bring some good information, bring some value to your appointment.

18:19 Yeah. Yeah. And to work on what's going to be most influential when they make a decision with that. All right. Well, our topic today is the weekly sales meeting. And we have kind of put together what we think is a good agenda for an hour long sales meeting. So I don't know, Scott, we hear from our customers all the time, especially the sales team. Oh, yeah, we do the sales meeting and they look at it kind of with disgust and it's like this painful thing they have to go through.

18:48 What do you hear of some of the common objections from salespeople to the sales meeting they're having? Well, I think they talk sales managers talk about their numbers a lot and the department and being down. They may echo some production delays. They may talk about salespeople hate about their sales meeting. Well, there's nothing new. It's all complaining and they're not really, you know, leadership is not communicating the vision that the sales reps need to step into the future every single day and do.

19:19 So leadership, I don't think is really empowering people holding them accountable, creating the culture of accountability, which increases the standards for everybody when we do that. I don't think that's happening. Well, I think salespeople don't want to be measured. So when they talk about the numbers, a lot of salespeople, two of the people on the sales team are happy. Eight of them are like, didn't make it, so they don't want to be exposed.

19:45 They don't want to talk about activities. So, because we get caught in the activities we're doing or not doing, so they're scared of that. I think the sales manager doesn't inspire them as you're talking about. There's no new information. There's nothing I learned from it. With very few sales meetings that we talk about, have any kind of a skill building of any kind. The sales manager is always the one talking or driving questions that embarrass them.

20:20 So they leave, you talk about don't lose your dignity. They feel their dignity is in the crapper after it's over, so they feel worse after the meeting's over than they did before. So, I don't blame salespeople for being a little distracted at the meeting. And the meetings go on forever. They start late, they end late. So I think that there's some things that they can do. So, we've got, I think, seven parts to this. You can pick and choose what you want to do.

20:50 We think these are important. Welcome and objectives. Well, first of all, an agenda. Have an agenda. Always. Because if you don't have an agenda and get that out in advance, maybe pretty close to the same agenda every time, although there might be some changes in the skill building or things like that. But put that agenda out and let people comment or prepare for the meeting. Because most people don't prepare for the meeting because it all kind of washes over them.

21:20 So, if you don't have an agenda, what you're doing is telling people, I don't know where this is going to go, but we're going to hour together, which might extend to an hour and a half. We're going to wander through the woods. Hopefully we'll find the pot of gold somewhere. So, the agenda helps you focus and it helps the team focus. The welcome, let's get started. Start on time. You be on time as the leader and you start on time.

21:50 And I'll tell you what, you start starting meetings. That's, you know, you're going to have your meeting eight o'clock, eight o'clock you start. You don't say, oh, well, not everybody's on yet. Let's wait another five minutes. All you're doing is telling the early people, be late next time. Yeah, exactly. Right. Punctuality is not important. But, well, yeah, and we're going to honor the late people. Right. We don't want them to miss anything.

22:12 We don't want them to miss anything. Well, I'll tell you what, start having them miss things and they'll start getting on the call on time. And if they can't get on the call on time because they're with a client or something is happening, it was unavoidable anyway. You could wait, what are you going to wait an hour? Right. Because someone's dealing with a problem. So, start on time, get yourself in the habit of starting on time.

22:35 And I think, you know, that will give people the clarity they need to know what's going to be covered and the assurance that this is going to get done in a timely manner. With thoughts on the kind of the start of a meeting. I totally agree with an agenda. We've been in sales calls that I've led and I failed to put an agenda together for the sales call. And it was, you know, signing up for another phase of working together.

22:58 And I did not do a good enough job explaining what's in it for them with another phase because they didn't put an agenda together. Every other meeting that we've had and we put an agenda together, we have a successful outcome because we've already prepared and predetermined what the outcome is going to be before we start to eat. Even our sales client meetings, I think you're very good at this. Here's what we have for an agenda.

23:17 Does that work for you? Yeah. Yeah. Is there anything else that you'd like to cover and make sure I want to allocate time? And that customer is always pleased that we have some where to go. This isn't going to be a wandering, as you say, wandering through the woods appointment. Yeah. So, agendas really set that confidence for people. Right. And the second step, sales performance recap and recognition. We talk about reviewing key metrics.

23:41 Is that sales? Not outcomes. I think it's probably more behavior. Okay. See, here's what everybody wants to rate people on. What did you sell today? What did you sell last week? Right. But as Scott and I talked, sales is a lagging indicator. It happens as a result of doing other activities right. So, look at the pipeline. What's happening in the pipeline early? Because if there's nothing happening early, if there's no appointments, if there's no proposals, if there's nothing going on, there's nothing going to come out the other end.

24:15 So, don't, you know, it's nice to say, hey, Scott made a big sale this week and, you know, we all applaud the big sale. But here's the question. Yeah, Scott, how long has that sale been in the process? Right. And what did you do to get it started? Yes. Yeah. It's not the close. A great thing to measure every single week is how many new conversations that I start with people that I didn't know on Monday. And to be able to look at those conversations as opening, we're opening a conversation, we're opening the pipeline.

24:46 So often companies will call us and say, hey, can you come in? We've got a closing problem. No, you don't. You don't have a closing problem. You have an opening problem. Your people are not starting enough conversations. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll tell you what, you start applauding the conversations and the contacts and not just the revenue. And you'll start to revitalize what's going on in your business because you're as one of my favorite bosses, John the Buff told me many years ago, people do what you inspect, not what you expect.

25:17 And if all you work on is revenue, you're expecting a lot of things to happen early on and we're inspecting the results, start to inspect the early start, the conversations, the calls, the appointments, and then you'll have something to applaud because more things will be happening later on. So I think that's really crucial, that sales performance and recognition. Any other thoughts on that? No, totally, totally grew through there.

25:44 So look at the activities you want to have happen. Pipeline review and forecast. So this kind of keeps coming together. But here's what we want to talk about. Keep your pipeline clean. Get rid of the junk and send it to marketing. That guy's been in the pipeline for six months and you've got a normal one month sale cycle. This one's probably dead and it's starting to smell bad. And so I like to give them the Fisher Cut bait.

26:12 Hey Scott, sounds like you want to tell me no. And if they say no, I don't want to tell you no, we try to go for a close and if they don't, we move, listen, I'm going to move you, send you some emails once in a while. If you want to know more, I'll call you in six months. Right. And sometimes that's related to the industry. There may be contracts with existing providers and you're trying to oust the incumbent. So you have to be able to stay in touch over a period of time.

26:36 But you want to be able to stay in touch to a point where they're getting excited about having your service and they almost want to get so excited they terminate the contract early or there's no chance of that incumbent lowering the price or adding on services to try to retain their customer because you got to fight that too when you're in that business. Well, if you've got that kind of contractual thing, you know, when those contracts, when you lost that business three years ago, you know, that contract's coming up in four years, that should be on your system should be on your CRM.

27:07 So you should have been sending marketing should have been sending emails to that company on a regular basis to know you're alive. You check in on a semi regular basis, not as often as the emails are coming. And then as you're coming into your threes turning the corner and that's the time to start engaging for a four year cycle, then you go out and start dealing with that. But that here's what salespeople are terrible at that ongoing connection.

27:33 Right. They want to deal with the hottest things. So let marketing do some of those things. If you've got a four year program or you've got a contractual time frame, marketing should have a specific marketing campaign that builds for somebody who is out of contract and we're trying to get back in in four years. That's marketing's responsibility. Right. Right. Maintain that type of mind awareness and work on adding more value to the customer and staying relevant in the business.

28:05 So what's that pipeline? Look for clogs in it bottlenecks. People who think they have something going on. It's all one year old. The good thing about getting rid of stuff in your pipeline that's kind of junk is that it gives you a realistic view of what's coming and you quit hoping on something that's basically dead. Right. So quit hoping that's not a strategy right now to book. I hope it's not a strategy. Yes. So all right.

28:33 Number four, strategy discussion. This is something that most sales teams don't do. I think this can be led by one of your high performing salespeople. What are our strategies? What are we doing different? What's going on in the marketplace that we can take advantage of? It's a tool that we can use to make phone calls to pass customers on. Where can we go back? You know, a lot of companies have a limited marketplace. They don't, not everybody's, you know, our problem is we have too many potential customers, but many companies, you know, that sales person only has a hundred people they can really talk to or a hundred companies, maybe five people in each company.

29:11 So they've got to make hay with those people that they have. So what's our strategy for getting back in there? What's our strategy for getting rid of the incumbent, especially if there is no timeframe, like a contract with that incumbent? And I don't think enough people do any kind of strategizing of what's working out there in the marketplace. What are the objections we're getting right now? Right? Yeah. I mean, so many companies we talk to and we ask them, what's your, what's your, your market value?

29:40 What's your value proposition in the marketplace and they go, we are the best. Right. That's our where are the best. You're the best. Oh, well, we used to be the best, but we got rid of all those things. So, right, right. Things change. All right. Number five, skilled development. This is the other area that most people don't do anything with. And so there are people never get better and they're surprised. Again, this can be led by a lead sales person, but what are some of the things that we can do to develop skills for people?

30:11 How can we design? Maybe we can practice phone calling. Maybe we can practice that appointment. Maybe we can look at each other's questions that we're going to ask in discovery. Maybe we can actually do some discovery instead of just waiting for quotes. So, that's just true. So what, what are some of the, what are some of those sales skill developments that we can do? Number six, action items and next steps. And now we're starting to wind things up.

30:38 What are we going to do? What's going to happen this week? And who's going to do what? So we had these three things that wanted to be done. We want to, we want to find a new article to send out to our prospects. Okay, who's going to find that new article? Where's it going to reside? Who's going to be responsible for having that done before our next sales meeting? Too many action items just be falling in. Somebody's going to do something about something.

31:01 That was what we decided. By some time. Yeah. By some time. Yeah. We don't know when, we don't know if it's going to be 18 months or six months, but we want to get back into our houses. And then the next sales meeting, we say, the next sales meeting, we say, well, Scott, did you do anything about that? Well, I wasn't really assigned to it. No, I meant to. I just got really distracted. Oh, I had a big time call. I had a little bit more urgent, not important.

31:27 And yeah. And I was working on the non-urgent, non-important area of my computer. All right. Final, sale, closing and question and answer. What do you need to know to be more effective? Let's close it up. Some kind of inspiration. Leave it on a high note. You guys can do it. You people can do it. We're really proud of our team. Come to me with any questions. Some of the things we find with sales managers, they're not inspiring people and they're not riding with their people.

31:54 They're spending their time behind their desk. You will get to know your team and their weaknesses when you ride with them. Oh, yeah, definitely. Definitely. You got to spend time with them and spend that time coaching and recruiting. I think those are two things that sales managers just don't spend enough time on. Well, that's why I don't fire my salespeople that really are underperforming because I don't want to go out and do the hiring.

32:15 Right. And I don't want to do the work either. Yeah. But if you had three good people in your inside sales who are begging to be outside sales people. That's a good problem to have. That's when you want to be. That's when your salespeople are a little bit more worried and they tend to function better. Yeah. I really like the idea of skill development and assigning a sales rep to deliver a skill that they're really good at to the team.

32:40 Yep. And have that be something that's every week. So as you wrap up the meeting, then assign a task. Who's going to be covering skill development for next week? And maybe create a list of, here's the rotation of everybody. So you know where you are and you're holding everybody accountable to always making it better and to be more relevant and to give us a story about how it was success. Yep. And the strategy too is something that a late salesperson.

33:04 Here's the opportunity. Here's the problem you found. There's a solution you offered. Here's the outcome we received. And you know we were talking earlier about the one thing in the quotes and I had a great quote by Les Brown and he says, if you do what's easy, life will be hard. If you do what's hard, life will be easy. And I told that to my nephews at a very young age and one adopted it and one didn't. There you go.

33:28 And it's always interesting to see the difference between the two. Yep. Great topic though. Well, let's wrap it up with our golden nugget and what's going on next week. So our golden nugget is the key to successful leadership today is influence not authority by Ken Blanchard. And the reason I love that quote so much is there are so many books about power and leverage and using authority to be influential. When I really love to be persuasive and convincing.

33:58 And I want people to be able to understand that reasons for them changing are in their self-interest. And that's why they quote us all important. If you want authority, don't be an independent consultant because Scott and I have spent the last 40 years having no authority, all we can do is influence. And so if you want to be an authority figure, you got to have this big corporate title so you can be an authority figure.

34:24 But I think we recently worked with a really nice individual and they didn't want influence or authority. They wanted friendship. They thought friendship was influence. So if I'm nice to people and what we found is they was being backstabbed. And so that doesn't help you either. So listen, all this information is going to be at winning at selling dot com. That's our show notes there. We have a show notes for each show.

34:49 This is episode 653. Next week Scott Welly will be with us. No book club. But please do start on chapter seven and eight. Please subscribe and share this podcast with your colleagues and on your social media network. Go out and get better one skill at a time. Joyful selling.