Episode 159: Why Most Sales Training Fails (And What Actually Works) — Transcript

Mastering Authentic Sales Strategies: An Interview with Geoffrey M. Reid

In this episode of the Happy Productive Podcast, Jennifer dives into authentic sales strategies with Geoffrey M. Reid, bestselling author of The Revenue Catalyst. This powerful conversation offers practical tools for entrepreneurs and sales leaders. It’s a must-listen for any business owner ready to master sales without losing authenticity or sleep. Say goodbye to sales dread and hello to confidence.

Transcript

Jennifer: Hey, hey, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Happy Productive Podcast. I have to tell you guys, I’m chomping at the bit because my guest today has so many juicy bits to share. You’re going to absolutely love this show. Geoffrey Reid, welcome to the show!

Geoffrey: Thank you, Jennifer. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Jennifer: Yes, you guys, Geoffrey, you’re going to love him so much. He transitioned from a public policy analyst (I’m sorry, Geoffrey, but that doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun) to a globally recognized sales leader. He entered sales in the year 2000 with no prior experience. He rapidly excelled, becoming North America’s top new business revenue generator in his first full year of sales. I’m tongue-tied, you guys, I’m so excited about this!

Now Geoffrey also focuses on sharing his extensive sales knowledge as a CEO, consultant, and speaker. He has a great book that we’re going to be talking about today, The Revenue Catalyst, Mastering the Art of Sales. Just mentioning the word “sales” makes some of you guys cringe, but don’t you dare check out! This is so, so important, right? Sales in our businesses. Geoffrey, welcome to the show! I’m so excited to have you here and I’m so excited to have a sales conversation about authentic sales strategies. I just want to tell you guys too, Geoffrey just did his first TED Talk yesterday! Big congratulations on the TED Talk! We’re going to have to check that out as well.

All right, Geoffrey, jumping into the sales conversation. I’m going to tell you right now, I’ve had a little pain in my sales organization, as I’m sure many business owners can absolutely relate to. What are the characteristics we should be looking for in a salesperson on our teams? We’re going to go into the mindset of sales too, because I do feel like sometimes people hear “sales” and they automatically cringe.

This is not a good thing because sales is the driving force behind our businesses. Without sales, we couldn’t keep our business doors open. It’s literally the most important thing you do in your business. Let’s actually start there. I’m going to change my mind on the fly. Let’s start with the mindset behind sales. What do you say to people who are “sales yuck”? How do you get them out of the yuck, Geoffrey?

Shifting Your Sales Mindset for Authentic Sales Strategies

Geoffrey: Well, look, Jennifer, this was really a big part of the impetus for the book because I had that same apprehension when I was looking at careers. That’s why I went into some of the more traditional work that I did. But in unraveling the reason why there’s a stigma around sales, an awful lot of that has to do with the fact that business schools don’t give credence or attention to sales.

Most are structured; they teach finance, accounting, human resources, and marketing. Sure, there are some aspects of sales in marketing, but it’s a very different exercise. Because they don’t add a lot of value to sales, there’s a stigma that I think haunts the industry, notwithstanding the fact that a lot of CEOs come from a sales background. They’re the best generators. The most important thing for business is revenue.

Revenue can solve any cost problem. All of this kind of came to fruition in an interview that I had with the president of the former university that I taught at, Alan Shepard. I taught for five years at Concordia University in Montreal years ago. He came to visit me when I was a CEO in London, doing a bit of a tour, saying, “How are we doing in preparing students for you to hire for your company?” I said, “Quite well. However, why is there so little sales education?” He laughed and he said, “Look, a lot of professors aren’t really comfortable teaching things they don’t know enough about,” which I used in the first page of my book as really the launch pad for why there’s such a misunderstanding around sales, why there’s a stigma, and why there’s such a big tent.

There are so many things called sales that are so different from one another. There are some cringey things out there, like there aren’t anything. But the type of sales that I really profess to is a unique one where salespeople are made, not born. It’s process-driven, it’s teachable. Attitude and mindset are at the heart of success in this discipline. It is a brilliant place to be when you can find that niche to implement authentic sales strategies. Perhaps I’ll just stop there for the moment.

Jennifer: All right. Can you be a really effective salesperson and also authentic, genuine, not schmucky and sleazy? I ask this because, and I know you’ve seen it too in the industry, you get really effective salespeople. I’ve been through trainings where they are teaching, you know, this is what you do.

It feels so sleazy. I am not going to tell somebody to take money out of their 401k for coaching, because as a coach, I would never coach them to do that. So why would I tell them to do that in a sales call? So, I know there are people right now thinking, wait, can you be really good at sales, but also be authentic, genuine, and not sleazy?

Geoffrey: 100%. The best salespeople don’t sell, they have people buy from them because they want to. It really is a pull effect. Smart questioning is the engine and the fuel that creates the transformative process of the minds of prospective customers as to whether they would want to buy or not.

We’re not saying, “buy this car or I’ll break your head.” We’re saying, you know, it is a conclusion, and it’s mutually agreed and it’s mutually beneficial. Sales done correctly is really the intersection point between negotiation and, you know, and there are fundamentals to negotiation that when done correctly, don’t make that a sleazy exercise, and sales is really no different. This is at the core of authentic sales strategies.

Just to add one more comment to that question before going back to you: the whole idea that fast talkers, the loudest people, the most boisterous, the back-slappers are the best salespeople is a big myth. Some of the quietest people I know are the best salespeople because they really allow ideas to grow in people’s minds without intervening unnecessarily. They also are trustable.

People buy from people whom they trust. So the whole idea of the stereotypes that we see that give us a bad taste in our mouth, I think are the exception, not the rule when it comes to the best sales approaches.

Jennifer: I love it. If we can actually be really good at sales and still be authentic, feel good about ourselves, human beings, what would you say is one of the next biggest blockers that you see that people have towards really embracing sales and feeling good about their sales?

Geoffrey: Look, the biggest challenge that people have, and it really ties back to the idea of mindset, is in many ways, what we’re doing is we’re looking into the future and we’re saying, “How much revenue are we going to create?” That’s a pretty daunting question for some people who have been taught and trained to risk manage or to look at what’s concrete as opposed to what’s predictable. The whole idea behind my book and what I’m trying to talk about is I feel that we should have as much foresight into the future when it comes to predicting sales as we do into the past, looking at patterns, because we have tremendous tools at our disposal, including data that allows us to forecast what we’re going to do. So a KPI plan is really at the heart of giving people the confidence that they can step into sales and make it predictable, especially when implementing authentic sales strategies.

It really gets to the point, Jennifer, where I could be doing a review with a salesperson and I could break down all the KPI measures that we’ve identified that do give foresight into results. I can reverse engineer their results by telling them exactly what they need to do in terms of hitting certain milestones to be able to achieve their income goals. So I think taking away that uncertainty through process is a big one.

I also think that there’s a chasm that people have to cross mentally when it comes to their own courage that is in the way as well. Certainly addressing that, I’ve never met a great salesperson who hasn’t crossed that chasm and all of a sudden felt comfortable with a little bit of uncertainty because of how their mind allows them to operate.

Jennifer: Very nice. So would you say, who is your book really for? Is it for the person trying to master their sales? Is it for the business owner trying to build a sales team or a little of both? Who really is your book for?

Geoffrey: Well, I wrote it to fill a big gap, which is fundamentally what all business schools miss, notwithstanding what people might pay for a four-year education at a business school. They’re not learning a lot about sales. After doing the interview with Alan Shepard that I mentioned, I’ve done many interviews, probably 2000 interviews of salespeople in my life. I eventually started asking people, “Have you taken a sales course?” Some said none, some said one. These are business students. I realized that there really should be a fifth pillar in business, adding sales as a fundamental discipline.

As a former university professor, I wrote this to fill that gap. In that sense, it applies to overzealous students who are trying to fill that gap when they’re in school, small business owners who realize that maybe they don’t know structurally best practices in sales. It also applies to managers and leaders in companies. So it really does cover the spectrum because of that lack of education that exists really across the board, especially when it comes to developing strong authentic sales strategies.

Jennifer: Nice. I love it. Okay. You guys, you hear it. The name of the book is The Revenue Catalyst, Mastering the Art of Sales. If you go to Geoffrey’s website, you can see links to actually go ahead and purchase the book, just letting you guys all know, because I know I’m getting really excited about it. It’s, man, I got to go check this out because you’re so right. There is a huge gap there in education and learning about this and making it something that we can all really embrace and get on board with and be excited about instead of it having to have a little bit of an ick factor when we talk about sales.

All right. Here’s another question. When we talk about a business and maximizing the business’s profitability, what in your opinion would be more important: stimulating revenues or controlling costs?

Geoffrey: Look, I think that I’m going to be the odd man out because most people will feel that they have a much stronger relationship with their ability to cut costs because those are the tangible things. But with the right processes and the right predictability into the future and sales structures, any cost program, any business problem could be solved with revenue. I’m not saying there aren’t inefficiencies in how companies spend, but most of the time people are automatically gravitating to cutting costs because they feel that that’s the only option. In contrast, having a strong plan to be able to find opportunities to grow revenues, how to hire the right people with the right mindsets that you’re going to be able to teach.

They don’t have to be fast talkers or slicksters or people with experience. My formula for finding the right people to work for my company is I wanted people who typically succeed at things that they set out to do and have a positive attitude. With that, I could, you know, I didn’t want to inherit people that had failed sales processes.

I would teach them the sales myself, but they needed to have the absorbability through their attitude and their desire and their willingness to be malleable. Once I could find the right people, then I have a program to develop the next generation of salespeople and really turn them into sustainable people who can then take on people and teach themselves. In many ways, the organization that I was a CEO for, well, many years I was with for 25, that’s how this company spread around the world and had 50 offices in dozens of countries, all by transplanting people that had been trained with processes and giving them the power, empowering them to really be able to go out and do the same with other people and growing a global company organically, as opposed to having to take it public or use money to grow. This is a testament to strong authentic sales strategies.

Jennifer: Yeah. I think it’s so important though, that I love what you’re talking about, but making sure that people are trained with the right process. My own experience was several years ago, one of our top salespeople, I mean, she was fantastic.

She just closed everything. She was fantastic. I’m like, don’t fix a thing. You’re doing a great job. She wanted to improve her skillset. So she went through a separate outside sales training class, course, whatever, and her close rate plummeted. She kept trying to implement all these just like schmucky things that they were teaching her to do. Whereas just her natural ability to get on the call and have a conversation where she was doing so well. It really messed her up and she never really fully recovered or got herself back on track because I think that they just confused her with a lot of different things other than just like her own natural ability.

I just think it’s so important that you have that right training, because then you can replicate it, but there’s a lot of programs out there. There’s a lot of sales programs out there that don’t teach really good principles. I’m sure you must see this as well. What do you have to say about just what you see out in the industry and what’s being taught when it comes to sales?

Choosing the Right Sales Program for Authentic Sales Strategies

Geoffrey: I talked specifically about this in the book as well, because I had a similar experience where I had done a partnership with a group in the mortgage industry. What we did was we took our best salespeople and started putting them on this special program and their sales plummeted too. All of a sudden, there was a lot of confusion.

They were teaching them things that were contrary to the principles that really gave us the ability to close. So going back to my comment about sales being a big tent, there are just so many things out there that call themselves sales that are different from one another. It becomes very difficult for business owners to know what is a good investment and where there’s risk and where there isn’t. Under those conditions, the least risk is status quo. You don’t do anything. So look, I think maybe just to talk about that spectrum for a little bit, and I do write about this in the book, when we’re children, we’re selling too.

We’re selling our parents on things. The only way that we can sell when we’re children, given our cognitive abilities, seems to be persuasion. “Please Mom, buy me this, buy me the sugar cereal so we can eat the Froot Loops together. It’s going to be great. Let’s do it.”

Jennifer: Or temper tantrum. That works too. Like, sold. Okay. Stop screaming. I’ll buy it for you.

Geoffrey: Absolutely. But that tends to be what people leverage for their entire lives because they become teenagers and it’s about convincing their friends. “Let’s go here, go there, do this and do that.” Then they go to business school, don’t learn sales. Maybe they end up in the real world and they’re taught to go sell. Your salesperson that you mentioned, she had an intuitive way of doing that. Hopefully she could have taught other people how to do it.

That would be the value in her learning a structure that was a little bit more formal, if she could place herself within it so she could teach it. Otherwise she’s a non-renewable resource. She can’t really tell people what to do. But on the other side of sales is really where negotiation exists. It’s resistance. It’s what universities and banks do when they sell to you.

The university says, “Jennifer, why should we admit you into our prestigious institution?” They put up resistance and they make you sell them. It’s a reverse sell and banks are doing the same thing when it comes to a loan or a mortgage. Between those extremes, everything exists in between. In many ways, we have to be choosing the program that best aligns with our current systems or be willing to modify those systems in accordance with the sales structure. Otherwise, there’s going to be a conflict and sales will go down. How can a business owner, and I’m not going to say the names of the programs I’ve been through, but I’ve been through probably the top in my industry, in the coaching industry, probably top three or four programs that are fairly well-known in the industry. I’m not going to name drop, but spent a lot of money on them, had a lot of very inauthentic practices being taught. How can a business owner protect themselves or know, “Hey, this is the kind of sales program that I actually want to learn to implement authentic sales strategies?”

A lot of these organizations on the front end, I mean, they’ve got very strong sales practices, right? They get you in there, they get you sold. Before you know it, you’ve dropped $10,000, $15,000. Then you’re still left with, “Oh, I just learned how to do something that I don’t really want to do because it feels gross.” So what are some practical tips like a business owner can know? When choosing, if you’re going to invest in a program or an organization to help improve your sales, like how, what can they, what can they know going in of what to look for?

Geoffrey: Look, this is such a common problem. It was one that I experienced myself for many years. I would not let anyone near my salespeople. We would have to train them ourselves because with all my reading of every sales book that I could find, for many, many years, I didn’t find anything that aligned with how we sold, which was really the negotiation side of sales. Then along the way, I found a couple of really good authors that positioned things correctly. That gave the confidence to then go down that track.

Part of it is self-awareness. You kind of need to know what is your sales process. In the book, chapter one is sales, is product positioning because we all want to position our product in the right way. There’s a whole, you know, the many theories around how to do that. But the second chapter is sales, choosing a sales process. By aligning the two, that all of a sudden becomes your unique proposition when it comes to revenue generation and aligning everything from then on with that is key. If you contradict it, people are paralyzed, and it really does.

It’s a, you know, it really goes to the lowest common denominator of people really not knowing what to do in any given situation to maximize results. So an environmental scan would be my short answer of everything that’s out there, really being able to understand ourselves and then be able to then choose the ones that best align unless one is willing to make wholesale changes.

Jennifer: Yeah. I’m going to say, sleep on it. You guys, sleep on it. Sometimes and your sales people don’t want to hear that. At least not the high-pressure ones. They don’t want to hear that. But the good people, even like for my sales team, I’m like, look, it’s a big decision. If they need time to think about it, let them think about it. If we’re the right fit, we’re going to be the right fit.

I just am like any kind of big decision like that, when you’re going to make a big investment, and I’m talking, you know, five grand, $10,000, $15,000, like partnering with a company to help you improve your sales, sleep on it and talk to your coach about it. Really do your due diligence before you make an investment like that, instead of kind of getting carried away in some of those inauthentic tactics. They can really suck you in. Actually one of my favorite guys, oh my God, such a good salesperson.

I would be afraid not to buy from this guy. He was just so good, but you know, not always having the best interests of the client in heart. It was more of just, he was just very, very skilled in getting somebody to, whether he shamed them or whatever, to just make a decision right now to get out of that discomfort of not making the decision. Anyway, sorry, I’m probably going on a little tangent here, aren’t I, Geoffrey?

Geoffrey: Any sales process is going to have a call to action. In many ways, my definition of sales is giving people good reasons to buy today. It’s not about buying today. It’s about motivating them to see the value in buying today. That’s where a lot of salespeople get it wrong and they leave residue, and it becomes unsustainable, and there’s buyer’s remorse, and people think backwards and wonder why they made the decision. Look, sales and urgency are, when done incorrectly, they mean pressure.

When done correctly, people buy from a desire that comes from within themselves. And that is really the tightrope and the fine line that we want to achieve in achieving sales mastery and effective authentic sales strategies.

Jennifer: Oh, that was beautifully said. I love it. All right, Geoffrey. So tell everybody before we run out of time, where they can find you, where can they go buy this brilliant book that you wrote?

Geoffrey: My website, geoffreyemreid.com (with a G, G. E. O. F. F. R. E. Y. M. R. E. I. D. com) offers links directly to Amazon. It’s interesting, when I was doing my TED Talk yesterday, when I was introduced, one of the students said he was a big Kobo guy and between the rehearsal and the event, he said, “I went on Kobo and I found it.”

So, you know, that’s what he does. Most people, a lot of people I know in my generation prefer books as opposed to on their readers, but it really is on every platform. It can be found at Barnes and Noble. It can be found on, you know, it’s being picked up by bookstores. So I’ve been doing some signings, but the easiest way tends to be how I buy books now, maybe it’s the lazy way, is going to Amazon. I have a little place because I have a lot of readers who come from different countries.

I’ve traveled all around the world. So you can pretty much go and select your country, your Amazon country, and go to that store. Cause if there isn’t a store, it becomes a little complicated, but it’s not that hard to find in brief.

Jennifer: Nice. I love it. Awesome. Geoffrey, thank you so much for being here today. I really, really appreciate it. I hope that you guys, as you’re listening, make sure that you act on something that you heard today, whether it is shifting your mindset around sales, maybe being more intentional when you’re getting on your sales calls or in how you’re building your sales team. You’re not going to get the results if you don’t make some kind of a shift, some kind of a change, and do something different based on today’s, or maybe you’re going to make the decision to go buy Geoffrey’s book and give it a read because it sounds like there’s plenty of amazing advice in there that you can all benefit from about authentic sales strategies. I once had a coach tell me if you have money that can solve a problem, you don’t have a problem. When you have strong sales and those revenues are coming in and you’ve got the money, guess what? There’s so many problems in your business that go away when you have the money, because you have the money to solve it.

You don’t have any problems. You’re right. I love it. We really didn’t have a lot of time to dive in deep on the cost cutting, but even with one of the things we use with a lot of our clients is profit first and where you’re running your business on percentages and you can only go so far with cost-cutting measures. There’s a point where you can only cut so much. At the end of the day, if you’re not driving those top-line revenues, none of those percentages are really going to work.

So I was throwing that last little nugget out there because it was so true that really at the end of the day, you’ve got to be driving those strong sales and that’s going to be the game changer in your business.

Geoffrey: Indeed. Sometimes you can cut so much that you’re cutting future revenues as well.

Jennifer: Yeah, exactly. Love it. All right, guys, get out there and read the book. Geoffrey, thank you so much for being here with me today.

Geoffrey: Jennifer, it’s an honor to be on your show. I love it. And I’m excited about the future.

Jennifer: Thank you so much. All right, guys, that’s it. Take some action from today’s show and get out there and have a happy productive day y’all. Bye.

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