Minter Dialogue with Mark Cox

Please send me your questions — as an audio file if you’d like — to nminterdial@gmail.com. Otherwise, below, you’ll find the show notes and, of course, you are invited to comment. If you liked the podcast, please take a moment to rate it here.

To connect with Mark Cox:

• Check out Mark Cox site, In the Funnel Coaching here
• Find/buy Mark’s book, “Learn to Love Selling” here via Amazon
• Find/follow Mark Cox on LinkedIn
• Check out Mark’s The Selling Well podcast (via Apple)

Further resources for the Minter Dialogue podcast:

Meanwhile, you can find my other interviews on the Minter Dialogue Show in this podcast tab, on Megaphone or via Apple Podcasts. If you like the show, please go over to rate this podcast via RateThisPodcast! And for the francophones reading this, if you want to get more podcasts, you can also find my radio show en français over at: MinterDial.fr, on Megaphone or in iTunes. Music credit: The jingle at the beginning of the show is courtesy of my friend, Pierre Journel, author of the Guitar Channel. And, the new sign-off music is “A Convinced Man,” a song I co-wrote and recorded with Stephanie Singer back in the late 1980s (please excuse the quality of the sound!).

Transcription courtesy of Flowsend.ai, an AI full-service for podcasters

Minter Dial: Mark Cox, how lovely to get you on. Well done finishing your book. “Learn to Love Selling”. You and I have exchanged many times over the years. You are based in Canada, and you are a titan in the world of sales. So, you’ve written your first book. Tell us, Mark, in your own words, who are you?

Mark Cox: Great. Well, first of all, Minter, thank you, thank you. Thank you for having me back on the podcast. I always love discussing the topic of B two B sales with a deadhead. So, I’ve always enjoyed our conversations. So, Minter, I spent most of my career running large sales organizations and outsourcing or technology companies. Ten years ago, we found it in the funnel with this purpose of elevating sales to the profession it deserves to be, and in doing so, improving the lives of all salespeople. That’s what we want to do. So, we’re sales trainers. We train leaders, salespeople, and BDRs and SDRs. And we’ve written the book to really capture the core elements of our sales playbook. And, yeah, we’re thrilled to have it out there.

Minter Dial: A BDR, what does that mean?

Mark Cox: Business Development Rep. Sales development rep. They do what you used to call cold calling 50 years ago, but there’s nothing cold about it anymore.

Minter Dial: Oh, boy. Yeah, it’s a sign of how long I’ve been out of the game, I guess. I don’t know.

Mark Cox: Well, I think you’re still in the game. But. But a BDR actually reaches out. It’s outbound work, reaching out into the universe to drive attention and awareness, and SDR actually responds to inbound leads. So, folks that have responded to your marketing and your content, that’s who they reach out to. So, similar functions, but some unique differences between them.

Minter Dial: Brilliant. So, in the intro, mark, you talk about yourself and what made you come into sales and in the funnel. And one of the things you talk about is your endless desire for learning. And I think curiosity is such a vital skill in today’s changing world. I write about it myself, and I always have to sort of think about my own challenge of capping my curiosity. In other words, curiosity can kill the cat. How do you manage your curiosity?

Mark Cox: Well, what a great question, by the way, tell me about how you think curiosity can kill the cat.

Minter Dial: Well, in this way, if you only listen and never do anything.

Mark Cox: Yeah.

Minter Dial: Well, good luck getting a business to go. If I were to say, oh, that’s really interesting, and then I open another tab, and then next thing you know, I have 25 open tabs, so I’ll read those later. And then you click on another thing and you go down endless wormholes. You can end up really eating up all the time you have, and that will end up being bad news and maybe even catatonic for your ability to act.

Mark Cox: William yeah, I get where you’re coming from. And by the way, this might tie in a little bit to your background as an amazing leader at L’Oréal and really focused on marketing in many ways. I might have the number wrong minter, but I’ve read recently something that says we get hit with between 30,040 thousand messages a day. So, how do I cap that curiosity in a live conversation like this? I really don’t cap it. I’m just super curious about you, your world, your life, what excites you, your experience with the dead, your experience with paddle, everything. I’m just very authentically curious in my own world. When I love to learn so much, I actually kind of time box if, when and how I do it. So, I do think about a given day. I get my learning out of the way in the morning, so I’ll get up. I have a stack of books. I’m going to be reading papers, and I do it when I’m having a good time. I love drinking coffee in the morning and I’m an early birdhouse, so I’m going to give myself an hour every day. To me, to feed the beast of learning. A lot of it might be prepping for our podcasts when we’ve got great guests like you, and it might be when I’m actually just trying to focus in on unique topics in b two b selling or leadership or mindset. But I’ll get it out of the way. I’ll capture that. Then I’m going to move on with my day. And as an entrepreneur, at the core, I probably get three major things done a day. And at the start of the day, I just make sure I know what the three most important things are. And that helps to keep me on track a little bit, because you’re absolutely right. I’m inherently curious, so I can get pulled down rat holes for sure. I did chat with an amazing person. She focused on happiness and with apologies, I can’t remember her name. She’s been on the podcast, but she gave me a good tip one time and she said, listen, when you get pulled down a rat hole and you spend half an hour on social media or 40 minutes, assess how you feel when you step away. What I’ve found is if I get caught down Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn and without any discipline, actually physically feel worse when I step away. It’s interesting. So, that’s some of the ways. Now, again, I still have the squirrel syndrome. Every once in a, once in a while I’ll go down a path, but I do think I don’t cap my curiosity at all when I’m talking to other human beings.

Minter Dial: You mentioned a great point, Mark, and well, first of all, with that podcast, I’ll make sure to put it in the show notes, so that’ll be homework for afterwards.

Mark Cox: Okay, thank you.

Minter Dial: Just as much as we might cap our curiosity with regard to the time we spend on learning, and I think that’s a vital thing. And I love the idea of checking in with your bodily feelings after you’ve spent hours endlessly scrolling through one meme after another and feeling absolutely useless. Might have found a few moments of happiness or giddiness, but in conversation, which I think is such the vital part of sales, it has been my observation that when you cap the time of a conversation, it can impinge on its ability to open interesting exchange. I mean, at some level, there’s always going to be a cap. Rogan’s three, four-hour podcasts are inevitably ended because at some point you have to get off the pot or you have to go eat or whatever. So, there is a cap in life, but the idea of having like a ten-minute call, it’s very unlikely you’re going to get into a proper exchange of listening, learning. And so, how do you gauge that aspect in sales?

Mark Cox: Well, again, I definitely think you have to be aware of the other person. And if we’re having a sales conversation, let’s start by defining what sales is. Sales is actually helping somebody else achieve a desired business outcome that’s meaningful in a way that’s mutually beneficial to them and you. So, it’s about helping somebody. So, of course, if I’m meeting with someone for a face to face sales conversation, talk about an issue or challenge they’re having in their business, they’re going to have a calendar, and we’re going to have timing allotted for a discussion with me, certainly, face to face, it’s never going to be ten minutes or even a half an hour meeting, it’s going to be a 45 minutes to an hour meeting. But I think there’s some responsibility to be able to guide the conversation. And oftentimes I think that’s what great salespeople do. They help guide somebody so that they can make a better decision for them. So, it’s not about pitching or cajoling, but I might be able to structure this conversation so that, uh, you know, first of all, I help them get the information they need to make the right decision for them. And part of that is discovery. That’s where the curiosity comes in. So, forget me, forget my product, forget sales training. If I was having a conversation with you, mentor, let’s, let’s just talk about your business. Let’s understand, where have you been? Where are you going? What are the goals and objectives? Why, why, why? Let’s try and understand what you’re trying to achieve and why it’s important to you and why you’re emotionally connected to it. And the more I can trigger that open discussion by earning your trust or sharing with you that my intent is actually to help you and in doing so, maybe help myself, but it isn’t to help me first. Then, then maybe I can figure out if there is a way to help you. But I think the challenge in sales is not capping the time for that conversation. I think the challenge in sales is earning the right for the other party to be open and transparent and authentic with you about what’s going on. And they’ll only do that if they believe your intent is to help them.

Minter Dial: That’s such a vital point. And I love the way you frame that, Mark, because I was thinking more about conversation in general, but what you did there is you made it all about the other person. And maybe the other person only has 15 minutes. Maybe only other person’s got other stresses. And like most relationships, there’s always attention. When there’s a salesperson there trying to flog something, you know, there’s a suspicion that automatically gets come up.

Mark Cox: It’s exactly, we call it a wall. And because again, I think that that 40-year-old stereotype of the salesperson or the Hollywood stereotype, that person, you know, really doesn’t exist. It never existed in what I would call big league sales. If you did large deals. We used to do large multi hundred-million-dollar outsourcing deals. There’s no pitching and cajoling and tricking somebody into that with a closing statement. It just doesn’t happen. But, but I think these stereotypes mean that for some reason this wall goes up if I’m having a conversation with, quote, unquote, a salesperson, because I think they’re going to try and they’re going to try and trick me into something or pitch something or they’re making it all about them or they’re going to waste my time. And I think in certain levels, even in the most sophisticated industries like technology, inexperienced salespeople, or salespeople that haven’t been trained or they’re not well managed and coached. I think that exists out there today. I think technology is expanding that or accelerating that in some ways, they’re having more lousy conversations with potential buyers. But I think the best salespeople, their intent is to have a conversation where they’re going to add value and insight. And I believe today, when people make a significant purchasing decision in a B two B format, they actually select the organization that sold better versus the company that had the best price, quality, or service features. And the stats back me up challenge. Shelley groups done research in this area. Even 1213 years ago, 39% of the time, purchasing decision favored the company that sold better versus the company that had the best price, quality, or service features. That was published in the Harvard Business Review in July of 2012. These days, I think it’s even higher percentage because they’re looking for value. They’re looking for insight, they’re looking for knowledge, they’re looking for help. It’s competitive in business today. You want to work with people who can help your business grow and succeed and achieve the objectives it needs to. So, I don’t think it’s complicated in terms of how to do this. And hopefully we captured some of that and learned to love selling. But I do think it’s very difficult. Those are two different things. Running a marathon is not complicated. The gun goes off. Just follow the person in front of you. But it is difficult. And that’s where what we’re facing in b, two b sales today, same, same type of thing. Very, very difficult to do this well consistently.

Minter Dial: All right, so you struck an interesting point for me, which is the difference? Well, in B two B, you’re talk about making a hundred-million-dollar investment. Yeah. You’re not going to manipulate that one around. You might, you know, there are some things at the margin, possibly, but then there’s the sales that most of the time that I’ve done, which involves selling a volume of units that are lower priced.

Mark Cox: Yes.

Minter Dial: And while the end money, we might be talking at the end of the year, in hairdressing in particular, which is what I’m talking about, selling shampoos and tubes of color and, you know, the occasional bits and bobs, it might end up being $20,000 at the end of the year, but each sale could be $1,000. And so, that’s not exactly 100 million. And how, to what extent those two different scenarios change the way you sell?

Mark Cox: I don’t think it does, because let’s use that example. We’re walking into the, now, for those of you watching this on YouTube, by the way, mentor cares about hair products and I don’t. Okay. You’ll find out why. You’re going to find out why. Minter’s got a beautiful head of hair, and maybe I don’t, but, um. But let’s use the same example. It’s almost more prevalent in some ways. You’re walking into a small business, they’re going to make a purchase. You know, perhaps they’re looking at a hair product. They’re not buying the hair product. So, so you might come in, say there’s a Ph balance, there’s a quality. This was manufactured here. They’re natural ingredients. They’re trying to figure out how does that hair product help them build a better relationship with the clients who come into the salon? How does it potentially help them upsell to the client coming into the salon who might want to take the product home? And so how does that reflect on the desired outcomes they have for the salon? More clients, better clients, higher prices, more profit. And by the way, there may even be things associated, mentor, with the way you deliver the product, the way you invoice the product, the way you, you know, the terms of payments. So, it’s looking at the whole life cycle of that product to help that owner achieve their outcomes. Maybe it’s an equivalent pretty good product, but because you do online invoicing and billing and you give them 90 days float before you start care, you know, chasing them down for the money, maybe those have a significant impact. So, it’s really the whole life cycle, the value of how that will help them run their business. And I’m pretty sure knowing you, the more insight that you have in terms of, I know with L’Oréal, for example, you really understood the world, the buying Persona you were selling into, those people who are running those salons, they looked at L’Oréal for thought leadership, not just on the hair products, but on running salons. I think that’s how you differentiate with any product you’re selling, Trey.

Minter Dial: And another point that you make me think of, which is the quality of relationships. It has always been my belief that b two b sales, b two b business is really much more about relationships than the product. Yes, in the hairdressing world, it was almost more obvious to the extent that we would generally be working with individuals who weren’t MBAs and strictly rational about everything, where emotions and relationships counted a lot. And yet, and so conversations can be really useful in that. But in relationships, you can also quickly get into ill relationships or malevolent or manipulative components of it, because as a salesperson, you’re still tied to making that number.

Mark Cox: Yeah, well, you’re absolutely right. We all have businesses to run and we’ve got goals and objectives. So, whether you’re a salesperson trying to make your quarterly number, your quota, or whether you’re a small business person trying to make ends meet or hit your growth targets and objectives, the truth of it is in both cases, if you don’t put the customer first, you’re short for this world of business. So, the second you start to make it about you, you might think, hey, I’m going to put a little pressure and I can control somebody into it, but you’re damaging a relationship. It’s going to have an impact on your success and what you do. For sure, there’s no question about it. And by the way, we’re repelled by any form of desperation as human beings. If somebody feels like they need something or they want something, you know, I’m particularly averse to companies at discount where at the end, you know, they. I’m going to have a conversation with you, mentor. We’re going to be talking about how we can help your business. We’re really going to be talking about, I know you, we’re going to elevate things. This is going to drive a great outcome. And then at the end of the quarter, I go, I’m going to give you a 15% discount because I get a bonus if I bring one more sale in this quarter. The second, the whole thing becomes about me. This becomes a different discussion. And so, you have to, this is the way you achieve your goals and objectives, by putting the customer first. That means, by the way, you need certain levels of business acumen. I need to understand how businesses work, I need certain levels of industry acumen. And when I have a conversation with anybody, I need to be able to add some value and insight. That’s how over time, I’ll build trust. I also, I also need, you know, to be the kind of person that they want to do business with. That’s, that’s matching your values. And if one of your values is helping the client or putting the client first, which it should be, that means I don’t start to get desperate. I don’t get start, you know, to behave differently at the end of the month or a quarter. If I’m not hitting my goals or objectives, you know, I behave a certain way no matter what. And that’s regardless of the pressure that might be being put on me by a sales leader or their leader, you know, when they’re trying to hit the quarterly goals and objectives. You have to behave in a certain way if you want to be long for this industry.

Minter Dial: That was an interesting point for me when you talked about the values creating a culture and in the funnels, cultural values, you talked about being customer centric. And you also had integrity. And I was struck, Mark, that you said, there’s no need to explain why here, because it has been my observation that the word integrity is used quite a lot, much like honest, transparent, or authentic. And the only way that that, for me needs to be spelled out is to what extent you prepare to have integrity. To give an example. Well, I have integrity. Integrity is what is wholeness. I am one, which means that I’m the same person at home that I am at work. Oh, really? For example, I have such integrity that I’d rather go out of business than sell you this product. Or to be a little bit more maybe prosaic and realistic, I’d rather this product fail than sell it to you and make you fail. So, the idea there that the integrity needs to be linked into some demonstrable, Orlando visible elements to make integrity stand up on its own, as in not integrity for integrity’s sake.

Mark Cox: Yeah. You ask such intelligent and interesting questions to get people to think right, because you’re on opposite ends of a scale. You’re sort of, it’s a bit of a polarizing question. You know, if my integrity is on the line, would I do this? My integrity is on the line to keep the business running. My belief is, I think not all of us think of it this way, but it’s a helpful thing in business and life to actually think about the values you want to put forward. And so, you said, you know, I’m one. One of them is I want to be authentic. I’m not the same person, you know, when I’m at the office that I am at home. Exactly. I certainly am authentic. But at home I’m running around making extremely inappropriate jokes almost consistently. And I sing my conversation to my wife about a quarter of the time. So, I’m not doing now, and she happens to like it, and so it works. But. But I’m not doing this around the office. It’s not just not the time for that. So, doesn’t mean I’m not funny. I’m just funny. You know, I do different things. So, I do believe that you can maintain your integrity and behave in a professional way. And by the way, I think good things happen for salespeople and for businesses if you do that. But I do think if you’re a leader of a business or a sales team, it’s probably a good idea to name some of the values of the culture you want to create. There are people who are good at, you know, can be good at selling. Um, that may not tell the truth all the time. I don’t happen to believe in that. I believe in telling the truth all the time. There are people in professional sales that aren’t good teammates and don’t share and collaborate, but they do well for themselves. We don’t believe in that. We believe in. We believe the company is better if the team collaborates. That doesn’t mean we’re. We’re. We’re not competitive on the sales team. But it’s golf. It’s not hockey. Hockey is a zero-sum game. One team wins, one team loses. And by the way, I’m Canadian. That gets kind of violent at certain points in time and at certain levels of hockey, it gets extremely violent. They don’t care what they do to win. But professional sales is golf. Minter will go out. When I’m in the UK and we’re going to play a lovely round of golf, I would like to win. I’m competitive. But if you lose your ball, I’m going to go help you find it. And when I find it, I’m not stepping on it so that it’s indented into the sand so you can’t win. I’m helping you and playing with it because I have a value system underway. So, I think it’s important. You know, and we talk about this a little bit in the book. What we do talk about as a sales leader, how do you actually create an intentional culture that helps you be successful? But it’s also a culture that people want to be a part of. And when I enjoyed your books mentor, I know you spoke a lot about that from a leadership perspective in the days when you were running L’Oréal out of New York.

Minter Dial: So fun extra piece. You talked about singing to your wife. I would love to have more of that, frankly. And you also mentioned how fun is actually one of your values. William.

Mark Cox: It is.

Minter Dial: William. The notion of fun in business and as a culture, I’m really leaning into this. You have a fellow Torontonian that maybe isn’t everybody’s favorite, but certainly I find very stimulating and a good read is Jordan Peterson, and he talks about how we should, how play is important in our relationships, especially if we want to have trust. And that. So, my version of this is bringing battle into business to play together, because if you play together, you truly trust one another a little bit. Like you said with golf, you know, you have those people who cheat. You know, they re situate the golf ball and make it favorable for them. Maybe they step on your ball. These are not people that we’re gonna trust off the golf course.

Mark Cox: Right.

Minter Dial: That is showing who they are underneath and they’re for themselves or they don’t have great integrity. So, the idea I wanted to talk about was how do you, how do you express fun in your business? And then is there a place for sense of humor in sales?

Mark Cox: So the second one, absolutely. So, sales is just a human interaction. And so, I. Absolutely a tasteful sense of humor and fun and playfulness. I have that in almost every conversation I’m in, including this one. Right. There are critically important things in life that come across all of our desks at some point time in our lives. This isn’t one of them. I was really looking forward to chatting with you today. I think you’re a great guy. I love the podcast we’ve done, you know, on the selling well before. And as part of this, I just, I want to have some fun. This is why I built this life this way. Now I also want to hit revenue goals, and I will have lots and lots and lots and lots more. People sell better so that their lives improve. So, the fun in sales there is absolutely a sense of humor and fun. We don’t have to be dealing with somber people. And by the way, sense of humor helps you communicate a thought or an idea or a message. Frankly, it’s helpful. What was the first part of the question? Mentor. I’m sorry?

Minter Dial: The first part was about having fun in your business, in the funnel, because you talk about fun being part of your value. And just the context for talking about that is that when I was running Redken, we used to say, we’re all about fun. And I really took issue with that because a sister brand in the industry matrix also said they’re about fun. And I took issue with it because I didn’t find it grounded enough or sufficiently profound and differentiable. So, afterwards, of course, it’s going to be at how you do things. Like you say, sales is about how you present stuff, not what you present.

Mark Cox: Right? So, the way we draw, you know, an example of fun for us is a couple of thoughts this morning before the podcast. We’ve got a marketing intern who works with us. You know, we go down, I took him outside, we went downtown Toronto, went for a nice cappuccino and a latte, walk back, have a great conversation, joke a little bit on the way, just enjoy the moment and the interaction. We’re not talking about business the whole way there and back. I’ll leave this, and I’ll be doing a webinar coaching call an hour from now. And I’m pretty sure there’s going to be some fun and joking when, you know, we’re playing with some of the other folks on it and have fun, get people laughing so they’re more open to learning and all of those kinds of good things. My wife’s role in our business, she’s literally called the minister of fun. And that doesn’t mean she’s, you know, leaving Yahtzee games all over the office or any of that, of that nature. But that, as it turns out, tonight, you know, as some people, some of our interns are leaving, we’re out for a nice meal with the whole team. Everybody looks forward to it. There’ll be a lot of laughing and great stuff. Probably won’t talk business at all. So, those are the things we want to smile and laugh and enjoy life. And frankly, Minter, you and I are not that different in age. I do think there’s a generational difference today where it feels like a lot of folks of our generation, we got to this certain level and it’s a now we do things we want to do. I absolutely didn’t feel this way when I was 24 or 25. I was thinking, I got to grind things out. There’s a whole bunch of things I’ve got to do. There’s certain things I’m trying to achieve. And I think certainly the interns we work with today and the young people on our team, they’re smarter than I was, and they’re in a different world where they say, well, listen, they want to achieve, and they’re so smart, but they do want to enjoy life. They’re not interested in working seven days a week. They’re not interested in insane commitments to do whatever it takes. But I lived in a different world where I started work during a recession, and it was extremely difficult to get a job. It’s not the case today. So, I think, again, it’s just these right ideas. That’s one of our values in life, is I want to have fun every single day. And if I’m spending a lot of time at work, I want to make sure I’m around people who enjoy to have fun. That doesn’t mean we take the eye off the ball, but I think it’s also smart. If you want to build a team and culture and have the top talent out there, they don’t want to work in a place and be miserable. Those days of command and control are over.

Minter Dial: Yeah, you talk about your learning about when you became a salesperson. You discovered you walk down the command control area, but then you, you reasoned out of it. You do write in your book about the challenge of recruitment today, and I think a lot of businesses have the same problem. You wrote it specifically, ive been in professional sales for 30 years, and ive never seen such an enormous gap between the demand for competent professional salespeople and the supply of suitable candidates. Why is that?

Mark Cox: Well, a couple of reasons. Over the last ten or 14 years, the influx of venture capital money into various different industries when they invested, particularly SaaS, so software as a service. When the money goes into the business, what they want to see is this explosion of the sales and marketing group. So, that revenue is going to increase and they’re going to hit the metrics. Back then, it was the rule of 40. It didn’t have to be but a positive. So, sales organizations were exploding. They wouldn’t train them. There was incredibly high turnover, but it really polluted the entire industry in a couple of different ways. One is those people are reaching out to buyers and bothering them. No value, no insight. So, now buyers are getting even more resistant to salespeople. And then it makes it really difficult when you’re recruiting because there’s so many of these people out there. So, if you’re hiring for sales roles, and there were so many of these organizations hiring so many salespeople, and the management wasn’t good either. So, you’d last for, you know, a couple of years or three years because no one knew how to manage you and they weren’t managing, you know, against performance and all these things. So, it’s pretty tough to tell if somebody’s capable in the world of professional sales. But most companies don’t grow, and that, that goes for very large enterprises and very small medium businesses. They actually don’t accelerate growth on an annual basis. So, finding people who are good at this is difficult. A lot of people in sales, not a lot of people that are great in sales, but they’re usually pretty good in a couple of interviews. So, if you don’t know what you’re looking for, this can be a tricky thing in terms of recruiting top tier salespeople.

Minter Dial: Well, you certainly talk about how to recruit better. And I thought that was a very practical model you bring out. You also talk about the challenge of being a good sales manager. In fact, you wrote, it’s by far the most challenging job in business, which I would take issue with. But I’ll let you know. I do understand how you write successful sale leader has to be part cheerleader, drill sergeant, strategist, data scientist, behavioral scientists, psychologists and technologists, which is quite the mouthful, for sure. One of the things you talk about was the ability, the need sometimes to bring tough love, but also sometimes love and the context that you had the minister of joy or fun in the form of your wife.

Mark Cox: Yeah. Donna.

Minter Dial: Yeah. At Redken, we had the director of love, and she played just an incredible role in our business and mincy to name her. And so, talk me through the moments where tough love is appropriate and what needs to happen in order for tough love, because I love, I mean, is sort of more obvious at some level, but tough love is a harder thing to give.

Mark Cox: Well, I think tough love, I want to hear more about the minister of the minister of love, but I think the tough love is holding us accountable to the goals and objectives and the commitments that we make. And so, an easy example of it might be if someone came in to present, let’s say we were doing a presentation to a client in a couple of days, and somebody wanted to come up and work on the content or the presentation, but they own putting the first draft together. I think one of the things you might do is if when they reviewed the first draft, you might ask them and yourself a question is, is this your best work? You know, depending upon the type of culture that you’ve gotten, the way you intentionally coach and manage your team, you’re either going to get somebody who’s going to walk into that meeting having done, you know, edit version one and two and three and then present it to you, or you’re going to have somebody came in and put kind of version one together. But because Mark’s got a good sense of humor and he laughs a lot, I’ll just get him to do and work through edit two and three with me. And so, particularly with small business or when, when we’re a place where people see to improve their career, like develop their career right out of college or university, it’s kind of on me to come back and go, listen, I’m not your version two and three editor, you know, is this the best work you can do? Okay. And then I come back and say, well, listen, if, yes, great, you know, let’s have a conversation about what works and what doesn’t. If no, why don’t you take it away and spend another day and come back with your best version? Because I think I’m probably better at providing some direction on version three. And what I find, Minter, is many of us, and including me, I’m going to get caught up in my day to day, just like you are. I’m going to be running around. I’m not always thinking about, am I doing the best I can to coach person a, b or C? But I think I owe it to them to make sure I’m well fed and well rested and I have enough white space in my calendar that before my next meeting with them, let me think about what I’m working on with them, what the opportunity is for them to improve and develop. And every once in a while I might have to have a courageous conversation with them. As long as it’s the best thing for them. Big difference. But, you know, sometimes there’s this courageous conversation that comes out of me because I’m having a bad day and, you know, I’m human and I make mistakes, but that’s a mistake. I think the courageous conversation comes when I’m in my best self and I’m in a good mood and I’m well fed and I’m well rested. But I go, they could have done better here. And so, we need this way of thinking about how do we let them know that and help them elevate performance.

Minter Dial: Yeah. So, there’s this self-awareness about whether I, I didn’t sleep well and I’m in a bad mood or I have a chip on my shoulder or something else that’s nagging me, that has nothing to do with the individual in front of you. So, I really like that. I want to dedicate the last portion, Mark, to stories around brand, because oftentimes one says, well, if you love the product, it’s easier to sell, but what about the brand? And this could be relevant in the story of recruitment. It can be tied in with this notion of having a purpose, a higher purpose than just sales and profits. And to what extent is brand a sine qua non for being a good salesperson, that’s great.

Mark Cox: What we believe one of the core values of great salespeople is they put the customer first, client first mentality. And you know so much more about brand than I do, mentor. But my belief of a brand is part of the brand is, you know, what is the promise to the customer? The brand speaks to the promise to the customer. So, frankly, I could be working for a patio door company. You talked about loving the product. I might work for a patio door company that just has this brand promise that says, when we’re working with high rises, selling patio doors to high rises. We have the best product in the market, the safest product in the marketplace, and were looking to make sure that people get to enjoy their home because the sun comes through in a safe way for their home. Trey, it doesn’t have to be a product you love. You don’t just have to be selling for Apple. I’m actually selling for that brand. Prom, by the way, I could be working for Apple that has an amazing product, which I love. But they’ve got a terrible company culture. They don’t, but they could. So, I think when you think about this, the brand is the promise to the customer. And I think for most people today, we want an engaged workforce. I think they have to be aligned with the value system or the promise to the customer, something they can get behind. I think brand is very important there. What do you think?

Minter Dial: Well, I’m going to give you a little story. When I joined L’Oréal, I was all keyed up to be in marketing. I was hired to be in marketing. And the first thing they did was they sent me on the road, as we say in French, sola route. And this meant that for six months I was doing, let’s say, door to door salespeople. It was door to door for sale salons in the heart of Paris. 1st, 2nd, 9th and 10^th arrondissements. And I remember it so well, 1st, 2nd, 7th and 10^th arrondissments. And it was amazing experience. So, as a market, all of a sudden I was like, oh, my God, this is actually reality. It struck me that the reverse could also be useful for salespeople to really get into the zeitgeist of what? In the head office? What the hell are they doing mucking around with the pantone red? That should be 732 instead of 734. And who gives a rat’s ass about that? And what about the logo and the typeface? Well, it’s just the words on a page. It doesn’t matter to me. The swoosh, who cares about that? So, I just wonder to, I mean, I am personally enriched, I was, by my experience on the road. In fact, I’m still friends with some of those hairdressers that I had back in 1993 in Paris. Holy shit. Sales is a job where you have to get the numbers in the and being in love with your product. As long as I’m getting my numbers in I’m getting my bonuses. I can be happy at some level, though, having a purpose that’s bigger than just making money, just making my year end, my month end is elevating and spiritually more fulfilling somehow. So, I think that the reverse could also be true.

Mark Cox: Well, when you asked what we do at the beginning, we said we’re trying to elevate this profession. We train people to be better at it. Hopefully, if they’re better at it, if they master it, they’re going to love it. But we said we thought this actually elevates the lives of salespeople. Because I’ve been a salesperson where I didn’t quite know exactly what I was doing in the early days, it was pretty miserable. And so, aligning to the why, no matter who you are, for what business and what industry, I think you have to understand why are you doing this? And for the vast majority of us, I believe you’re happier. If it’s about a customer first mentality. I’m working with someone who stands for something I’m a part of something that other, that people value being a part of. Right. I’m a part of the Redken or the L’Oréal community, and people value being a part of it. So, this is why I’m here, because they actually put the client first. So, you know, it’s interesting. Minter brand is such an interesting topic for me because for what we do, we don’t get into the brand space. We assume there’s this. The environment is the environment. We are where we are. We’re not on the marketing end of the business. We’re trying to say how do we take what we’ve got today and then execute a sales program that accelerates growth on the brand front? As a small business, this is something as well we think about, but probably not enough. When somebody thinks of in the funnel, I’m not sure we’ve achieved that level of branding out there. I think our brand for our business for the most part, is me. And that is what we’re trying to change currently because we’re bigger than me, but it doesn’t appear that way. So, I think there’s more work for us to do along those lines. But I love this idea of it has to be something people, this is what we stand for, this is our promise to the customer. And it has to be something that will attract the types of teammates, the types of teammates that are attracted to that brand and that purpose. Those are the people we’re going to want in our business. So, defining that clearly is super important to find the right people.

Minter Dial: All right, Mark, just to close off, just before we got on, I said, hey, Mark, why on earth did you write this book? I didn’t say it with disbelief, but there are a lot of sales books out there. What did you hope to achieve with this book?

Mark Cox: I think every salesperson kind of wakes up every month, quarter year trying to think about what’s my game plan? Somebody at some point in time is going to say, what’s my game plan for the year? What’s my game plan for the quarter? And of the plethora of sales books out there, we’ve never found one that says, these are the four or five things you need to think of both strategically and tactically to first articulate your game plan for the quarter and then go and execute on it. And we’ve spent eight years of training people and being in front of large organizations, mid-sized organizations, small one, trying to really refine this so that it’s simple enough that it’s easy to understand, but because it’s professional sales, it’s still difficult to execute. But that’s what our intent was with this book. We want somebody to pick up one book, read one book, and be able to think of how do I accelerate sales performance for the next quarter or the next year? Whether I’m an experienced salesperson who’s been doing this for 15 years, or whether I’m brand new to the profession, or whether I’m a small business entrepreneur trying to figure out how to take my great product to the market. What are the four things you need to do to convert that core capability, whatever it is your business has, into revenue for the business. That’s what we’ve tried to capture with “Learn to Love Selling”.

Minter Dial: Jeff. Well, you bring love, you bring strategy, and you bring a very good, strong, practical plan, which I think is going to be valuable for all salespeople. I’m going to finish with the quote from the book that I found most appealing has no shame or no surprise, perhaps, in saying that it involves the word empathy, and it’s something I feel is really not talked about enough. Mark, you write that in the challenge of leading people, leading salespeople in a team and creating a culture, one of the things you believe a sales leader’s role is that they have empathy for what the leaders go through. So, someone in sales also needs to understand with empathy the issue of their sales leader. So, often it’s only the sales leader has empathy for their troops. And I really think that was a brilliant piece. Mark, how can people hire your business? Listen to your podcast. And of course, most importantly, at least for this moment, get your book.

Mark Cox: Thank you for asking that question, Minter. The book is “Learn to Love Selling” the universal b two B sales playbook, available on Amazon Ingram Spark. If you’ve got a large sales organization, reach out to us. We’ve got bulk orders available in special pricing. The podcast is called the selling well, and we have amazing guests like Minter dials talking about heart, official empathy. So, take a listen. We’ve got some wonderful podcasts there. And then finally, the easiest way to connect. Please connect with me on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn. I’m Mark Cox, and it’s in the funnel, but M A R K C O X, easy to find. I’d be delighted to connect with anybody on LinkedIn.

Minter Dial: I should put all that into the show notes. Mark, and great pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much. And keep on loving the selling and making sellers.

Mark Cox: Well, thank you so much, Minter, what a pleasure chatting with you today. I really appreciate it.