This is one of six video sessions are designed to help young men understand some of the basics necessary for their lives as providers and churchmen. They cover areas of time and money management and matters of career selection. The teachers in this series are local church members who are. experienced in their areas of instruction.

Music So we're here to present an introductory treatment of the whole matter of sales. We're doing it really to particularly equip young men and help them think through the whole matter and to see if they might fit a career like that. And there are a number of reasons why doing something like this you know can be helpful. First of all, it's helpful for anybody involved in anything because we're always communicating something, we're always representing something. So I hope the things that are said here tonight are applicable beyond just the person who's going to be a sales professional.

The second thing is that sales is special in this way. It's the ultimate transferable skill. If you have this gift and you're good at it, you can almost go anywhere in the world and do it, and you can almost represent anything. Now I say that in a qualified way because there are different categories, but it's immensely transferable And so it allows a flexibility in a man's life to do different things with his particular skill set. And the third reason I'd like for us to do this is to help people make distinctions.

Some people shouldn't be going into sales as a profession. And I've seen young men beat their head against the wall and fail and fail and fail when somebody should have just told them you shouldn't do this. And maybe a discussion like this would either encourage someone or discourage someone from going into sales. So that's why I've invited my two favorite sales professionals into this whole thing. Jim Santels and Paul Carrington.

These men are seasoned professionals who've sought to glorify God in their representing the things that they represent. And so, why don't, Paul, why don't you tell us a little bit about your life in sales and what you're doing right now. Sure. So my name is Paul Carrington. Right now I am the Regional Vice President of Sales for a company called Salesforce.

So I run a team that manages the Carolinas up into Virginia. But I first got my start in sales in 1996 and I was in university and needed a summer job, and so I started selling alarm systems literally door to door, just going down the street, knocking on doors and trying to sell people an alarm system subscription. It turned out that it worked out fairly well just for a summer job, but it was really my first introduction into kind of the life of sales. I didn't have any formal training or anything like that. It was just literally going through the motions, learning, trial and error and so on and so forth.

But where I first I think got my full introduction into sales would probably be my first full-time job. So just before I got married, I think I was about 21, and I started working at an insurance company. And so I basically became an insurance rep where I was selling over the phone, car insurance and auto insurance and so on. And then got to the point where I was managing a team there. And then I got a call from a friend who was struggling.

He and three other guys had started their own company. And two guys had MBAs and two other guys were designers. And it was a web design firm but no one could actually go out and sell the product and that was their conundrum that they found themselves in and so he tapped me and asked me would I take the risk to come on board with them and long story short I ended up taking that job on and then ended up becoming the president of that company and then ended up selling it. When I ended up in 2006 coming back to Canada from Africa, I joined the company I'm at now, Salesforce. I've been there on and off for about eight years or so.

Started off as a sales rep and then kind of moved up the ranks to where I'm at at this point. So that's a compressed version. Fantastic. Jim, what about you? Jim Santels, like Paul, 1996, was the genesis of my sales career, really was.

After seven and a half years of active duty Navy, I would interact with some of the sales representatives who would come in from the various pharmaceutical companies. And as they came in, I thought, well, you know, I could put on a suit, you know, I could smile at people. And they gave pens and brought lunches, and I thought, well, this is perfect for me. So I can do this. And so I talked, I befriended a couple of the sales guys who came in and they said you got to finish a bachelor's degree.

It was a requirement to get in the healthcare side of things which is kind of where my background in the military was, was all pharmaceuticals and and healthcare related so it made a lot of sense for me. So, but to cut my teeth I had to do the same sort of thing. So I had to finish my bachelor's degree and then get some experience selling. They didn't want to hire in the pharma industry, they didn't want to hire somebody who was completely green without any sales experience, even though they could like you and think you might be a right fit. They wanted to see some evidence of some productivity.

So in 96 I started off with a company called Airborne Express. Sold air freight accounts. So I'd cold call just the same. I'd pick up the phone and call people and accounts that were stuck in the file deep in the drawers. This one they tried years ago, so I had to cut my teeth for about a year before I could build some evidence of successful sales.

It was interesting because we'll talk about this as we go along with some of the attributes of sales, when you think of a sales guy, well those things were transferable in terms of outgoing personality types and the things that you think of. But I was a miserable failure in my first few years and we'll talk about how the gospel affected that. So I think it will be profitable. But that's kind of the history now. Well, to the modern day now, after 96, I've been in the healthcare industry that entire time from pharmaceutical companies, avoided the moves, some of the vertical moves because of the requirement of what it would have meant at the time for the family to move or make some changes But I'm currently in a in a regional position where I cover four and a half to five states For an eye company called nodal vision we make a product for the eye for patients So that's where we are now good deal.

Well, let's let's try to define this beast So how would you describe what is sales? Sales itself is conveying a message that brings a consumer to a point of decision. It's a profession of being able to articulate and communicate what either a product or service is that moves somebody to a decision point. That's how I would define it. Yeah, I think that's a good definition.

I think Really what it is, it's a transfer of goods or service for money, right? That's really the fundamental definition of it. But really, to Jim's point, I think as you get further down, it's kind of like in it too, if it's a sales profession, it becomes more of a science. And so what you're doing, anyone for example, anyone can for example, fix a kitchen sink, doesn't make you a plumber. So you can go out and sell something but it wouldn't necessarily make you, say, a sales professional.

And so I think understanding the science behind what goes on in the sales process, Some of the stuff that we're probably going to talk about more and that we've been doing for a while is really what would typify or describe it probably pretty accurately. You know the sales people that I've known that are really effective, they love to talk about stuff. They love to talk about what they're doing. Sometimes they like to talk about themselves. But the reason they like to talk about themselves is because they like themselves, but they're effective because they like to talk about the thing they're representing.

So what's that all about? I think there's a couple of them. In terms of salespeople, a lot of the people, for example, now that I'm looking to hire are not necessarily the people that talk the most. A lot of things I think now that you're looking for are people that are thoughtful, strategic thinkers, people that are good listeners. And so that's probably pretty much a typical description of a salesperson.

It depends on I think what kind of thing that you're selling as well. And the mindset of the person has to be, if you're going to be successful, probably a better listener than a talker. But that's a great temptation I see all the time as well. I don't know how to describe it other than sales people are usually pretty passionate about what you're selling because you have spent a lot of time in communication, it becomes perhaps a little bit more natural where there might be barriers for some people. Maybe those have been taken down just by a lot of failure and experience but generally speaking I don't necessarily think the best talkers always make the best sales people.

That's been my experience so far. Let's talk about that. Let's drill down on that a little bit. Can I add a piece to that? Let me just add this element.

You have to make a distinction between how the world sells and how the Christian should sell. Right. There's a distinction there. The world, and I know this because I spent almost half of my sales career as a non-Christian, so at least a third I should say. So there is a distinction where the man-centered man is going to be, you know, where he's central to the dialogue, to the discussion, bringing attention to himself, the abilities that he has, whereas the Christ-centered man is going to use the very attributes that you mentioned, the fruits of the Spirit, listening well, compassion, getting in other people's world.

We'll break, well you know, we'll break that down a little bit more in the discussion, but you have to make a line of distinction. If the Christian's going to pursue it, it's the fruits of the Spirit, not the fruits of the flesh, right, in the sales world. So when you're trying to teach a young salesperson not to talk so much, delve into the mechanics of that. What do you tell them? So for the people that I'm training right now, there's a couple of reasons I think we talk too much and I think that's an excellent point you just brought up in terms of the mindset of say a Christian salesperson.

Sometimes people are nervous and so they end up rambling and going on and on and that can be something that's a habit that needs to be broken. But I think one of the most important things is self-awareness or self-consciousness, constantly checking in with the people or the person that you're communicating with because you can tell the more you do this, you can probably tell, I'm sure you've had the experience when people are being polite, or they're just being polite and glazing over and you're going on and on and you're missing the buying signals. In other words, they've signaled to you that they're ready but you just want to keep talking and talking. So I think It really has to be an active, conscious thing that you say, look, time to listen, time to sit back. And it might be going on calls with these individuals and sitting down and after you've gone through the call, kind of diagnosing it, debriefing it, figuring out, okay, what could we have done better, what could we have learned from here and so on.

Those are some things I do with my team. There's a phrase that you've probably heard, you can talk your way out of a sale, right? You can over talk it so much that the obvious evidence to the end consumer is the guy's not in tune with the real things that I need, he's just rambling on and on. And that rambling can lead to such nonsense and you're over promising and under delivering. We'll talk about that concept a little bit.

So it's probably universal regardless of what sales arena you're in. The guy that talks too much ends up being a time waster. I'm in the medical field, so especially relevant in my field because a physician's gotta keep truck and they've got people waiting, and you get somebody just wants to come in and ramble, they're gonna find out after a single visit If you're worth my time or you're a waste of my time, and if you're a waste of my time, you're not welcome back here, and I'll tell my staff to keep you out. There's representatives in my field that aren't allowed back for that reason. One thing I notice is if you're selling to corporations as well, where you're dealing with the C-level, and C-level simply means like CIO, CEO, CMO, CFO, these types of leaders within the organization, the executives.

They manage their time in increments, usually at 15 minutes. And so if you're someone who is going to waste their time and spend 10 minutes in getting to know you type of stuff, you're wasting their time. These people are people who like to get to the point and decide very early on in that first minute even if you're someone that they're going to want to partner with going forward. So it's very important that you be very, very conscious of not rambling and going on and on if you don't have to. When you catch yourself talking too much, you just realize, I think I'm talking too much.

What do you do? Well, I find if you catch yourself talking too much, A lot of times unfortunately you're not even aware of it. That's a habit that's been ingrained. One helpful thing might be to have someone else listening in that's going to give you some sort of objective criticism of how you do and how do you perform, how do you manage the sales cycle. I've done that and it's very helpful.

Another thing I do after I close a sale is I go back to the customer and ask them specific questions because I want to improve. So I ask why did you buy, what were some things I did wrong and so on. And a lot of times you'll find things I'm not even conscious of and they bring it to the table and now I can make adjustments and hopefully take that into the next buying cycle that I'm involved in. But to get to your point about questions, I think the better way, The person who talks the most in a sales meeting should not be the salesperson. That should be the people that you're actually working with where you're gathering information and it's not just a monologue.

That's the worst type of sales presentation you can ever imagine. It's got to be more of a dialogue or there's more people, multiple people talking to you, but at the same time you're, they're asking the questions. I think question asking is probably one of the greatest skills, you probably agree that a sales executive can probably master the ability to ask, not just questions, but thoughtful, good, provoking questions, challenging questions as well, not just questions where you know the answer. Sometimes we're tempted to do that, leading questions, but you want to ask questions that actually challenge and cause people to gain new insights or add new insights to what you're, the customer that you're actually working with. So there's a difference between if you've heard the term closed-ended versus open-ended questions.

Did you like the sandwich you just ate? What's the answer? Now an open-ended question is can you describe this versus the one you ordered yesterday? Tell me, explain to me how this impacted you, for example, or give me examples of what you're doing with an open-ended question is you're then transferring what Paul's saying is you're really wanting it to get away from you and what your objective to sell is to discern all the facts that are relevant to the value that you ultimately want to present to the customer. Okay?

And you're not going to know that unless you can draw that out. In Proverbs it talks about counsel in the heart of man is like deep waters and a man of understanding draws it out. So in a sales cycle if you're doing an adequate job, you're asking as many open-ended questions as possible to gather all that you need. So what I heard you say, and this is why in your initial dialogue you talked about the general skills, the skill set that's critical to church leadership, to church in general, right? In a relationship, in your marriages, and even in starting your own entrepreneurial endeavor, you have to be able to know how to ask the right questions that gets what you need out of that.

And that's the information to help then come back to you. So now I can say, oh, what I'm hearing you say, am I hearing this correctly? What I'm hearing the gaps are here in your practice for example in my field, okay, in applying this technology that we have is I have to ask questions and know their process and very similar I'm sure in the software field. You've got to understand their process and that means you've got to ask everybody and get them so comfortable with the way you're repeating it back to them. Okay, this guy really gets it and that person has now earned something that's critical to the sales cycle.

It's trust. You don't have to work hard to close that deal because no one else is doing that. And if you're drawing those things out of people, this guy really cares about what I do. I'm going to talk to Susie over there at the front, I'm going to talk to Bill over there, and I'm going to gather those things with the right questions. So, anyway.

Yeah, I was the head of an electronics manufacturing company many years ago. My question was, hey, what are you looking for? What do you need? What does it look like? You know, what kind of supplier are you fishing for?

So I would just listen a lot and try to see if we were able to connect with what they were looking for. I always went in with a question, not a proposition. The temptation a lot of times is, depending on the product that you have or service is to jump immediately to demoing, in my case, where you have a product that you can actually demo and maybe in your case, pulling out the product that you're gonna try to sell to the physician. And that's a huge, huge temptation that I think a lot of young sales people make. And so they just want to get right to their product, show how it works without first understanding the business.

You know what they call that? You know what they call that in our business? Show up and throw up. Because you have all this, think about that. It is, I have all of this information and I'm kind of nervous in the sales call so let me get it out there for you.

It's a show up and throw up and it'll ruin the sales cycle. So this show up and throw up thing, I'll give you an example of what this looks like. Here's what it looks like. I've sat there and Paul in the sales management role, he's evaluating the tech or the representative's ability to do this, right? And if you're sitting in a sales management position and I've trained sales people, so I can watch them show up and throw up and you watch the customer every time, right?

Their eyes start rolling back in their head. It's this, yes, they just agree and they play the game because they know it's like, I just gotta do this to get through this agony. I wanna be done with this thing because there's no value to me. The guy's just data dumping and you're not hearing a thing. It sounds like the Charlie Brown teacher, wah wah wah wah wah wah.

That's what it sounds like to the guys. Okay, yeah, next. So I recently had an experience with a sales rep. I mean he went in and he talked and talked I would say probably 80% of the time. Even when the customer wanted to say something he would interject and come up with another story that would go down this other path.

And he came out of that meeting just thinking, man, I did an amazing job. And the customer and the other folks I was with there with him, everyone had a complete opposite view of course, but he didn't have that perspective because he was so busy. Popped that balloon. Exactly. And so just last Friday after letting this go two more times, him and I had a heart to heart and just laid it out for him.

He understands it, we're gonna see if it translates into practice, but the point is, is that you've gotta be alert, be very aware of your tendencies, I think, and then from there make adjustments. It might be a complete blind spot. Now he's aware of it and he's got to make those adjustments going forward. We'll see what happens. It's coaching.

It really is coaching. You don't acquire, you can have character traits consistent with selling, but learning how to be a good sale, a skill of hearing people well and learning from what they're telling you and not being so nervous about what you're doing that you're just showing up and throwing up or data dumping on people. That's a learned skill and it can be taught, right? So even if you're not the most flamboyant of characters and you're not wired that way, that doesn't mean you can't learn great skills that make you very successful in this field. Absolutely.

Yeah. So give us some sample questions that you have in your memory banks that you use to draw people out. So a couple of questions I would ask, again I think you brought up an excellent point. They're going to be open-ended. So, a couple of things I would say is, tell me about your business.

Not even a question per se, but a statement. In my world, that's something that's very significant. And I'll usually, that's a shortened version, but I'll say, look, I've been out through your website, I've read your press releases, if it's a public company, I've gone through your 10K, but a lot of things don't show up. Tell me your perspective about your business." And that's how I'll start. The other thing I'll ask them specifically is, tell me about your role in the company.

What's important to you? How are you measured? Things like that are gonna be super important for any executive that's making any sort of purchasing decision. And then what that's helping me do is anything that I'm selling later on, not in the first maybe three meetings, I won't even talk about product. But I'm gathering a lot of information and then when I finally get to my product, I'll be able to tether it all back to what you told me and that's called, usually it's return on investment, right, a very common phrase, ROI, and it will be tied back to what I would call critical objectives that the company is trying to achieve.

So you've got your company objectives, you've hit on those, where's the company going, where are you going to be in five years, questions like that. You've got the person's main motivations, hopefully, and now you can start to build some sort of framework so that when you actually have your product on the table, it's not just your product alone, but it's your product with all these tentacles attached to the company's objectives as well as the person's primary motivations. So you have to practice this. It doesn't just happen because the truth is we're all uncomfortable in selling scenarios unless you've practiced it enough. I mean, obviously some are going to be more comfortable than others, but you have to practice open-ended questions.

We do this at home. You wonder why conversations, even in the church, you wonder why conversations are like, I just can't get anything out of that guy. Well, all of your questions are closed-ended questions. So, did you like the service today? Yeah.

Did you like the message today that Mr. Brown gave? Yeah. There's a different kind of question. Hey, what did you like the most about the message that you heard today?

Can you describe, you know, how this affected you? Tell me more. Just those simple insertions of, I didn't even complete the sentence, just by saying, well describe what you mean to me. It's the same thing you were describing as you were dealing with people that would call for services. Just describe what you're looking for.

That alone. Then the guy, you can't get him to stop talking. People, what you find out is what the scriptures tell us that man loves themselves, right? So you turn the question back to the purchasing agent guy or the physician and you get somebody, it takes nothing for a man or even a woman to pontificate. You just have to ask the right question.

We're so busy asking closed-ended questions and we get nowhere and we wonder why it's such a difficult conversation. But we practice this at home, at our table, we practice asking open-ended questions. Try it at church. There's the guy or gal you can never talk to. They don't say a whole bunch.

Ask them an open-ended question. See the difference. I think what you're trying to say that the best practice for this is talking to your wife. Be careful. Be careful what you ask.

Might not get to his bed tonight. Right, exactly. Might be there for a while. Hey, but there's truth to that, though, Paul. Honestly, men, you know, in their marriages, better be willing to ask open-ended questions to their wives.

The truth is men don't want to do that because they know what's on the other end of that. Let's be honest about that. Let's talk about different kinds of sales experiences. You guys have been involved in different categories. Let's just talk through some of the categories that people might be able to fit into.

There are unique differences in the kinds of sales that you can do, right? There could be the cold calling job that somebody takes from the comfort of their home or they're looking to augment their income so they're just making simple cold calls. All you need for that is essentially a decent backbone that could just handle all the rejection and you know it's a matter of numbers you know if I make a hundred calls I get ten who accept. So that's a certain personality type that's okay just doing that and being rejected ninety percent of the time with a hang up or whatever, but that's a form of sales. And then there's a consultant kind of sale where you're dealing with professionals or executives and the goal again is extracting from them.

So It is broad, it's extremely broad in what sales is in general. So my statement to a young man who's pursuing it is, where are you comfortable and where would you like to be stretched to? If they want to be stretched, then it's going to grow into a consultant kind of sell one-on-one. Yeah, I mean, different kinds of sales experiences take some particular skills. Like, for example, if you're selling real estate, you've got to find out what the customer wants.

But then you become somewhat of a shuttle diplomat. You're doing shuttle diplomacy because you got this seller who's overpriced his house and the buyer says no that's way too much and you got the inspector who's saying he's trying to kill the deal with the inspection. So you've got this, you know, this a real estate person is trying to make peace with everybody and try to bring all these people together who are kind of contrary. Well that's a different kind of a sale than what you're doing. So, and I agree with everything that Jim was saying, I think to change the comments a little bit, I think what happens is this, as a sales, say a young person looking to get into sales, first of all, you could probably cut your teeth on anything to see if you have some sort of aptitude towards it, some sort of ability to deal with rejection, as you mentioned.

Are you resilient after 90 nos? Are you still able to pick up the phone. And be happy. And be happy and do it the next day and face 90 no's again. So those are some things that will hopefully kind of gear you and get a sense as to whether or not this might be something you'd be able to do.

But then there are different types of sales people in the sense of if you're working in a dealership as a car dealership, those leads are coming into you. There's really, you're coming in perhaps at 30 or even 50 percent into the sales cycle where they've done the research and they've done a lot of the work and they're coming in to either make a decision and you're there to guide them to that decision. Same thing, a real estate agent might be, okay well someone's looking for a house. There might be other types of sales where you are going out and they call them hunters where you're literally just going out and you're trying to knock on doors and figure out if there is someone you don't know when you knock on that door if there's a potential customer on the other side. It does take a different type of mentality to do different types of sales.

The guy working inside a dealership has a lot easier than the guy who has to say quote-unquote knock on the doors and when I say knock on doors that could be cold calling into corporations or literally knocking on the door selling you know your typical vacuums or encyclopedias that kind of thinking but the idea is that you need to have a specific mindset in those roles versus say someone who's having deals brought to you. I mean I found in the kind of sales I was doing with my electronics company because I was the head of that company I was the chief salesman and you know we when we started this factory we just had a very small equipment set and we could only address a really really narrow range of the manufacturing services in the industry. So in the first year I would sit at my desk for six, eight, ten hours, eleven hours and hear no, no, no, no, no, no, 900 no's, you know, But I had to keep going until I could find that person who needed this narrow range of what we were able to do. So resiliency is really critical.

To know what you have, focus on what you have, and make do with what you have. And what salesmen often want is a world that's bigger than where they are and so they're not successful because they can't dial in on what that narrow range of what will make them successful. They always want to add some, oh, we can make this sale. If we only had this, well... You don't have that.

You don't have that. And I would say a good motivation for anyone considering sales is probably a wife and children at home. To hear those no's and still be able to go forward again, to me that's a big motivation. You've got mouths to feed at home, so. What are employers looking for in salespeople?

Self-motivators. They don't have time to babysit their people. They shouldn't. Self-motivators, go-getters. They're knocking on doors.

They don't need you to sit and watch them. They're just motivated and driven by their belief in what they're doing and the need to feed their family or whatever is motivating them to do what they do. So finding them is hard in our, probably in our current day and age people who are self-starters, self-motivators, they're innovators, they're bringing ideas and approaches that are helpful to the company. That's what they're looking for. And obviously the character traits that we see in scripture, you know, the fruits of the spirit, they're joyful, they are somebody you're proud to send out because hey, the salespeople, this kind of as an aside but it is relevant, the sales people is often the first person and the only person a company has exposure to of your company just like in the gospel.

When we present the gospel, we might be the only Christian messenger and ambassador that person meets. And if We're living a life of hypocrisy and that's the extent to which they understand who God is. You have a very serious responsibility. People who get that is what an employer is looking for. When I put on this shirt or I put on this suit, I put the name badge on and I give my card, I really am that product to that customer.

I'm an individual, certainly, but I really am this company and this product to that customer. Yeah, and I was reading an article the other day where sales professionals are probably one of the most in-demand roles currently out there in terms of people wanting them. And so if you think of people that are hiring, companies that are hiring, they are more interested in hiring the right sales people than they are in the technology that they have to manage the sales cycle. Even it might be equivalent in terms of their level of investment with their product. So it gives you some perspective.

Sales managers for example right now when I'm hiring new sales executives, a lot of times people can do really well in an interview. You can coach people to do well. They can listen to videos. They can go online and figure out what kind of questions you're going to ask them. One of the things that we do is we actually force a salesperson before they're hired to come in and do a presentation.

So they're sitting in front of people that are maybe three or four people. For example, Scott, you'll be the CEO, I'll be the senior sales vice president, you'll be the account executive, and it'll just give a perspective to see how does this person communicate, how do they manage a room, how do they ask questions, how do they engage their audience, And it gives you some perspective that you can't really fake all that well as you can through an interview question. So I think that's one of the big, big things. You're looking to see how can people perform in a real world scenario. Are they curious?

That would be a big thing. Are they creative? Going back to resiliency, I think that's probably the ability to bounce back from failure. One of the questions I always ask someone, I don't want to know about your great successes, tell me about a deal that you lost and why did you lose it? Give me your perspective on that.

You get a sense and then you ask the question how did you bounce back or it could be a life situation, somebody died, whatever it is, how did you bounce back? What did you use or utilize? What was it that caused you to come back and keep going the next day. You can usually find out a little bit about the person from questions like that. So it's a character in combination with skills.

Your skills are important but if you don't have that bedrock underlying character, it's going to be a very tough go, I think, as a salesperson. So I'm looking for the character probably more so than the skills because you can teach a lot if you get a good, you know, someone who's self-motivated, like you said, somebody who's hungry. Those are the things I'm looking for and then from there you can help them master some of those skills or refine them as they get more entrenched in the company. You know, this piece I'll put in there as well. The likability factor's high on the scale.

Do I wanna sit down with this guy or gal? Do I wanna take that time with that person? And the other element that an employer is going to look for is have you demonstrated this with success? Because there's a lot of very likable people, but that doesn't translate into sales success. Are they diligent?

Have they practiced the fruits of the spirit in terms of hard working, you know diligent and and patient and all the things that that are required to show an evidence of a track record to an employer. Are they likable? Do I want to and are they showing a track record here of success? Absolutely. Very important.

Can you spot the self-motivated person up front? Up front? I would say it's personally, I think it's very difficult. A lot of people can talk a good game. There's so many resources out there right now where people can pull the wool over your eyes.

I think it's hard to say. You can spot them. You can look for body language. You can have kind of off-the-record conversations. You can find out a lot of different things, but at the end of the day, you know, it's very difficult to do that, I think, in my perspective.

I don't know if there's any particular keys or cues that you look for. But one of the things is maybe triangulating having different people talk to them, different people on a call. And usually, we do that, and usually after the call, I'll get back with the person I was on with on my team and say you know what were your thoughts, what stood out to you, were there any funny issues, scenarios, anything that rose to mind from an integrity perspective because that's one of the big, again going back to character, It's very big that I think is very important but it is going to be difficult if people are lying to you or if you don't really get a sense of their motivation. Going back to Jim's point though, I think a good track record would hopefully give you a sense as to what kind of person that you're dealing with. Let's talk about authority.

My personal experience is the worst sales people don't honor authority. Let's talk about that. You'll always have management. You'll always have an employer. And if you don't respond to that employer with a level of honor and willingness to shuffle your own deck, You know, you talk about the coaching that you give somebody.

Well, if there's arrogance, if there's pride of man that rises up that doesn't take the coaching, that guy's not employed for long because he might have an outgoing character. He might have some of the attributes you look for, but he doesn't have the skill set and the spiritual maturity or even spiritual content to receive and submit to an order and structure of how to do a sell. For example, I know a VP of sales at a company that came in and as the VP of sales came in had a, you know, there's tons of philosophies on selling. So the VP is brought in and what does the VP do? They implement their game plan and their strategy and their the sequence and how they they open the deal, close the deal and work the sales cycle.

It varies from company to company and from individual to individual. Well if the guy doesn't have the spirit to receive that and can't transition in honor of that authority structure and hey this is the way I've always done it, I'm ten years with the company, I've been the top sales guy. But he's not willing to receive more thorough instruction. Maybe the company has been flat and needs to grow, but this guy's stuck in his ways because he's got a track record that may have been good. I've seen guys fired for that, even though their track record's really good, because the new regime has a way they want to grow the business and they have an expectation to their authority.

Absolutely. I think that's an excellent point and being teachable is probably one of the most important character traits, again going back to character traits that someone, and you probably know as a pastor, you can get a sense of people who are teachable versus people who think they know everything. And I think that translates into every area of life. And so that would be one of the things you can really pick up on very early on, is this person teachable? Are they going to take what I'm saying?

Are they going to take criticism because there's going to be a lot of criticism and are they going to be able to make those adjustments? Are they going to get angry? Are they going to get defensive? And again that goes back I think to authority and that person isn't going to last long primarily because if performance is going to suffer, they're not teachable and then their character, they're going to be probably pretty corrosive with customers or with their fellow employees as well and that's not somebody you want because when you're selling, I think in my world where I'm selling, we have kind of a statement, never lose a loan. In other words, when I'm going in to sell a big deal to a CEO, I'm not going in by myself, I'm going in with four, five, or six, or eight people.

I may be quarterbacking everything, but if I'm corrosive and I'm aggressive toward my own team, it's just not going to bode well for that whole deal working behind the scenes. It's going to translate to the way I'm working with the customer as well. And so, bottom line, it's short term. You may get short term success, but long term, it's like the dishonest salesperson. You get short term success, I can sell you these shoes, you get home, They fall off.

I'm not going to continue. That's only going to be short-term. I got to move on to something else. If you're going to make a career out of it, you've got to be teachable, which means you're responsive to authority. There's a certain level of wanting to learn, be a learner, all the way through, and that means you're looking.

And then I think most importantly as a Christian, there will be times when you'll be tempted to compromise. And so if you have no greater authority than your boss, and your boss sometimes might be the one telling you to compromise, and if God is not your authority, you're going to be in a world of hurt. You're going to be in problems of compromise with customers, either lying to your customers, you're going to be in temptations going out to certain events that you'll end up compromising in order to win the deal and these are terrible things. So your authority has to be God above all where you're answerable to him. And that's what's gonna keep you all the way through.

Praying before you even go into meetings, things like that, where you're looking to God as your provider, I think is super important. And then yielding to his principles to make sure that you're abiding and you're doing the right things in the sales cycle all the way through. You know people who they don't honor authority, they undermine the company in different ways. One way is they bring unprofitable deals because they're not... They really honor the customer more than they honor the integrity of the company, and so they bring bad deals all the time.

And they also bring deals that you have to do something strange, extra, or expensive in order to do them because they haven't learned to limit their focus because the authority has directed them in a particular way. They want to do their own thing. So let's talk about compensation. So if your motivation is to feed your family well, the success of a sales guy draws more and more revenue production. That's the bottom line.

When your name, better is it to, I'm thinking of the text of scripture, Better is a good name to be chosen rather than great riches. When you're in the sales arena, like many other arenas, word travels. If you've established a name for yourself of the fruits we've talked about, trustworthiness, diligence and proven track record, companies take notice and the escalation in compensation can be dramatic and it can be pretty quick. You mentioned earlier, companies are desperate these days to have good quality trustworthy sales people. And they're the ones in the trenches driving much of the success of the business.

You get a great product and a bad sales rep, Recipe for disaster. It's a recipe. Then your ROI, your return on the investment in the individual that you've made falls flat and the growth that you expected out of that hire doesn't happen. But if you've got somebody that's got a proven track record and that person comes in and produces rapidly and there's a net reward, you can't afford to lose that guy. Yeah, so at our company, and I think this would go for any companies that I know, sales people are probably the best paid that I can think of in our company.

And the reason for that is exactly the point that they're the ones generating the revenue for the company. So you might have engineers that are building the product but there's a certain element of motivation to go out and they're trying to really capture part of our human nature which is you know to excel and to earn money and so on. And usually the way compensation works, it depends. So if you're in a corporate setting it might be different than, say if you're just cutting your teeth or starting off in sales, it might be strictly 100% commission. And you go out there and if you don't sell you don't eat.

And then as you kind of get further down the line in terms of say corporate selling, what you'll end up doing is probably getting a base and then on that base you'll have a commission on top of that. So even in months where you don't sell something, your base is able to sustain you and then you have this big uptick in terms of compensation. So it really does vary but most companies are looking to really master and tap into a really strong compensation plan. Our company is constantly revisiting, checking out what is competition doing, right? What are they doing to pay the reps?

What perks are they giving? They do all sorts of things like trips to Hawaii or trips to Europe, things like that, to really make sure they're motivating people. Now that's kind of in a worldly way. I think the salesperson who's a Christian is going to be motivated Hopefully by a higher standard than that and just trying to get to Hawaii this year or something you want to honor your employer You just want to perform well And you want to excel but the compensation it really would change fly across the gamut I mean you're gonna have all sorts of different compensation plans right across the board. So I'll give you a real life example of this, okay, from 1996 to the year 2006 I probably had a 300, 2 to 300 percent increase in revenue production in that time.

Specifically because when you break into the field as you just mentioned, you can start off with a base salary but then the next company hears about your success. Or if the guy that you worked for at that company took a management position and got promoted and immediately saw your skill set and the evidence of what you produced for that company and is calling you. You need to come and, you know, there's a reason they pay LeBron James what they pay him. The owner doesn't drop shots in the net, he does and people end up showing up and buying jerseys. So there's a reason he's producing so much revenue for the organization that they want to keep that guy faithful to the organization because the net effect in the company is exponential.

So the same thing happens in sales on all levels. If this guy is produced and been productive, I'm going to take that guy with me. So I have so many personal relationships with people who have seen the results that no matter what situation you're facing, they want to put you in the best scenario they can possibly put you in to keep you loyal and faithful to the company. And that means more pay. Absolutely.

And if you think of it, depending on the model of the business, so in our case it's a residual model, right? So again it goes back to that. Our company, if you sell a product today, we have say a 95% retention rate which means you'll renew next year and next year and keep going. So they'll comp you or compensate you very highly for that first year because they know that they're going to capture it on the second year. So when you do the math, it's almost like a snowball effect, right?

If you, say, as a salesperson, sell 100 customers this year and then 100 the next year, now you've got 200 customers in the churn. And so even if a few drop out of that, you've got a very, very strong snowball going down that hill and so companies recognize that. So if your quota is say a million dollars, they have no problem say comping you at say $200, 000 because they know that million dollars will be in a million next year plus the million that you're going to sell next year again and you can obviously as you grow a sales team of say 7, 8, 10 people you begin to see the math and it becomes very easy to say I'm going to compensate this way because it's going to obviously equal much, much more revenue. It's going to motivate the sales rep continuously as well. Numbers are going to vary though across.

If you're starting off as a salesperson, you may start off at a fairly low level. At our company and other companies that I know, they'll start you off doing the hardest job in sales first. What do you think that is? It's cold calling. They'll start you off on cold calling and they weed out those who can't cold call.

If you're a small business person and you cannot pick up the phone and make phone calls, it's not going to last long. If you're relying on business to come in waiting for that phone to ring, it's not going to work. So if you don't exercise those muscles early on and kind of pay your dues, so to speak, in the first two years of your sales career, you're not going to get past that. And so it's a really good way to weed people out. But those people earn probably pretty minimal, but then they're aiming, those people that I know, they're saying, I'm not going to do this forever.

I know I'm going to be here for maybe a year and then I'm going to get up to this level and then to that level. So they're working to Jim's perspective with a vision of making a career out of it, not just doing this for see if I can do it. It's not a kind of a something they're falling into. It's very intentional to move up to a certain level where now they can support a family and they can do some of the things that they'd like to do. Hey, the truth is if you do sales well and you've produced and you have a track record, you can end up calling the shots.

You can call the shots where you end up wanting to go, who you want to work with. It becomes because of the grace of God and because of his kindness and how he's produced through the fruit that he's given you and the value to the company can be so great that you can end up with a kind of flexibility and earning potential that's uncommon. Not always true but it depends on the company. Let's just talk a little bit about personality. Let's talk about personality and character.

What does personality have to do with success or failure in sales? Well, personality may get you a step closer. It may be what gets you that first handshake or the meeting, but that's only a small part of long-term success in sales. I had some of those personality character traits, but I was miserable my first three years in sales because I didn't have the other fruits of the spirit, diligence, perseverance, honor and integrity, and one without the other. So you can have people say that all the time, well this is a sales guy, a sales personality.

But I've seen people without that quote personality extremely successful in the right sales scenario because they have the other attributes that are more important. They're trustworthy, they're faithful, they show up on time. That's the guy I can count on when I need him. And because they have those attributes, it compensates for the fact that the personality might not be the most outgoing personality type. But that's the most faithful representative of that company and the customers end up loving that guy.

I would say there's a myth. I noticed this myth really propagated a lot of times with people who kind of look into sales from the outside and they have this view that the most gregarious, most kind of glad handing kind of this prototype salesperson is going to be the most successful and from it's just not the truth. So the most successful salespeople have a lot of those traits you mentioned and a lot of that would be perseverance. You have to have this attitude of perseverance and it can't be necessarily external things. I mentioned before being married and having children, that's good but there's also got to be this inner drive to do well, to get up the next day and do the same thing and fail.

And that kind of goes hand in hand with resilience. I think that's very important. Trustworthiness is going to be absolutely critical. And then being a learner, I constantly am looking for people and I'm trying to develop that within myself to constantly not just kind of get to a plateau and say, okay I've mastered because I haven't and there's always much much more to learn. So I think that's gonna be absolutely important and then you mentioned I think Proverbs 20 verse 4, you know, by reason of the cold, you know, He just sleeps in, just kind of doesn't come out and doesn't do the thing he should be doing.

So there's this element of being a hard worker. If you're not a hard worker in other areas of life, chances are it's like the missionary thinks he's going to be a missionary in China that doesn't talk to anyone. Here it's probably not going to translate very well when you get off the plane. And same thing, if you're not a hard worker, it's probably not going to translate well into sales because there's a lot of grunt work, you know, a lot of adorn work that you're going to be doing that isn't very appealing. And I would couple that though with not only being a hard worker but being smart.

When I talk to my team I call it sharpening the axe. It's not just about taking these massive swings and trying to exert as much energy as possible but taking the time to be smart about what you're doing, the activities you're doing. So sharpening the axe in the sense that you're being smart, you're learning from your failures, you use strategy and things like that. So those would be some of the underlying characters, character traits. A guy at a previous company I worked for didn't have the outer personality.

In fact, it made you kind of uncomfortable. Like, how did this guy get this job? Is what you first thought when you meet the character. In other words, he just had more of a flat affect. He wasn't the big bubbly personality, what people think of when they think of sales, or the first one to extend the hand necessarily even.

But let me tell you, as you got to know this guy, he became one of the most likable and influencing type of personality because of the consistency and faithfulness. He was knocking on doors first thing in the morning and he was finishing late consistently. And because of that, even high level professionals that I worked around said, that's the kind of guy I know when I need something he's there for me and as a result the entire staff would just brag about this guy. We love him. We love this guy.

Are we talking about the same guy? Yeah, we are talking about the same guy. Let me tell you, this guy is the most faithful we have. So, you know, again, the stereotyping needs to extend. If you're a Christian, you have diligence and faithfulness and stick-to-itiveness if that exists, but if you have those attributes, you can have a very successful career in sales.

There's no question. Absolutely. What particular sins and temptations does this profession carry with it? Pride. Number One is pride for the reasons mentioned previously, coachability, do you honor the authority structure at the workplace that you're at and the pride of man is going to be the biggest issue and laziness.

Laziness, I mean it's really this this field is all about diligence and hard work and going after it. If you're lazy in your tendencies and you don't follow through, it's going to be a hard road. You're not going to find yourself very successful in it. I would say also, you know, the love of money is going to be one that's going to be on top of you, especially if you do do well and that I think comes with pride, right? And so it might cause you to look to yourself more or when you have succeeded to ride on your reputation even not just among your people that you're outside with the world but also within the company.

There's a great temptation because what happens in a company is when you're doing well, your boss wants to point to you and put you on a pedestal to say, hey why aren't you all doing what Scott's doing or John or whoever you are and so there's going to be this temptation to kind of you know buy into your own PR kind of thing where you think that you're more than you really are and so that's that's a great temptation just simply treat it as a career, do well at it but don't make it your identity. That's a big, big problem as well. So it's definitely a temptation that I would be aware of and I'm constantly trying to make sure that I'm aware of as well. So other than pride, sloth, greed and lying, it's pretty dangerous. It is pretty dangerous.

And there is also great temptation for compromise, worldliness, just somehow this gradual dripping, well maybe I can do this or that or I had a, and this is a true story, the other day I was talking to somebody not on my team but someone who's kind of related to my team, kind of someone who supports my team. Him and I were having a conversation and he mentioned to me that in his circle of friends that the wives will tolerate anything they do beyond a perimeter of 250 miles. In other words, if you're more than 250 miles away from home, you're game. And I told him, I said, well I'm a Christian and if I'm in Las Vegas or I'm in China or in Africa or wherever I am, I'm married. And that is something that this guy was basically willing to compromise on.

When I said that he said, oh yeah, I'm a Christian too. He backed up on it and said, hey, you know this is not something I do but the point is that there will be lots of temptations thrown at you from whether it's trips to all sorts of events and things like that. You have to be able to say, no, I'm not going or this is not in keeping with what a Christian man ought to do. You have to be firm. People respect you for it, by the way, but there might be a cost as well.

So you have to be prepared whatever way it goes to suffer that consequence. I'll add this piece. If you struggle with lust of the flesh, right? If you're carrying one of these and the company gives you a laptop and you struggle with this, which is the next session. If you struggle with these things because in sales you'll often have to travel, it might be an overnight or two, what do you do when no one else watches?

And if you're on this and you're willing to expose yourself to those kinds of risks and that's an issue you're dealing with at a young age and you've not put those things to death with the Lord, you know, carrying you through that, this will kill you. It'll kill your marriage. It'll kill your testimony. Sure. Okay, so you're sitting in a restaurant with the young guy who thinks he'd like to go into sales, and he's just heard all of this.

What's the last thing you want to tell him? If he can say he's self-motivated, if he can, if he is a self-motivated individual and he feels that this is something he's willing to take a risk because that's another thing about sales that's I think important early on if you're going to start off as a sales guy, it's going to be a risk and if you're willing to take that risk and fail and then get up tomorrow and fail and get up tomorrow and fail and somewhere along the line of months you're going to succeed. In other words, you're kind of counting the cost ahead of time. I would say go for it and if you're teachable then you're going to be able to master it, you're going to be able to learn it. It's not to the point we were making about this great, you're effervescent, just bubbly personality.

It's going to be, Are you going to put in the grunt work to learn the skills and to be a professional? And if you have that drive, it can be a great career. So sales is the ultimate put up or shut up business. So what I'm going to say to that young man is, show me. That's all I'm going to say.

Show me. If you want to pursue it, show me. Let's go. Come to work with me in a couple of weeks. Show me a willingness to cut your teeth and do the difficult things.

Prove it. Because it's the show me business. That's what it is. Show me the evidence that you can produce. I'm going to turn it right back on that guy.

Okay, talk is cheap. Show me. One great temptation that young man will face very early on after getting those nos is what we call make work. In other words, he'll be in his office and he will be arranging things, researching and doing everything except what he should be doing which is picking up the phone or getting in front of people. So that's the great temptation.

The more you fail is to do make work, to do things that actually don't produce revenue. I think that translates probably in life, in other areas of life as well, but that's going to be one of the biggest things and if you can get past that, you can do pretty well. And find a mentor, find someone who's going to help you, you can meet with weekly or monthly, whatever that is, and talk about your failures, talk about what you're going through and try to get advice and tips and that's going to accelerate you because you're going to not only learn from what you're failing on but someone like Jim or someone else who's been around for a while can give you insights that you might not otherwise get except by falling down on your face and getting back up again. You can probably accelerate your success quite a bit by doing that. Good deal.

Okay, well so let's show him. Let's show him.