Welcome everybody to the Advanced Selling Podcast, the longest-running sales training podcast in the history of podcasts. This is our podcast. I'm Brian Neal. I'm Bill Kaske, the other hour, the other half of hour. We were just talking about what to do, and Bill made the very wise and obvious point. We can do whatever we want. This is our podcast. What do you think the owners, what would the board say to this? I don't know. Hang on, let me ask. Um, yeah, we're here every week for your listening enjoyment. Uh, insider, insider, you need to uh join the program. If you're not join uh part of the program, be part of the program. Meets every Friday. Um, or once a month, I shouldn't say every Friday. Those are folks a month. Yeah, first Friday. Yeah, first Friday that one with Bill Live. Great people, great coaching, great training, great value. So join that program, would you? And um, we know it's our 20th anniversary. So we need to break a made to make to make a pitch for audio because we've gotten a couple. We have gotten a couple, but we need dozens more. We need dozens. And uh listener to advanced sellingpodcast.com. Just send it there. Little audio file. Just literally take your phone voicemail. You can say anything you want. You can cuss us out if you want. You can say we're full of baloney. Yeah, uh, we'll bleep you out if you cuss. That's fine. Keep our uh G rating. But uh, we'd love to hear from you. Just if you've been a long-term listener, we just want to give you guys a shout-out, too. We just think it'd be kind of fun. And since no one else is planning it, we planned our own party. It's kind of like just waiting for all the people to come like, hey, let's do something for Bill and Brian for their 20th anniversary. And so far, nobody's said that. So we'll make our own party up. That's fine.
SPEAKER_01We will. That's funny. We will. So the target date is September. So now is the time to get your audio in. Listener at Van Sunnypodcast.com. Just make it a short little one minute, you know, what it's meant to you, uh, you know, how you listened to us, how long we've been listening. Just give us some clips and we'll we'll make the best of them. Yep.
SPEAKER_00Give an update, personal story update.
SPEAKER_01Well, a couple of weeks ago, we talked about my uh misconstruing of a barista at Starbucks when she said, I gotcha. She came out, I don't remember. She came out from behind. I was waiting there for a while, and I'm like, hey, is anybody back there? Oh, hey, hey, I got you. And I got you. I thought meant I got this, meaning she's gonna buy from me because of my delay, my one-minute delay. And so I put I put my uh card back in my wallet, and she goes, that'll be 327 or whatever it was. And I'm like, Oh, okay. So I thought I got you, man. Well, anyway, so I told that story, and then the other day I went in um and I had a uh a sports jacket on. I was going to a funeral of a friend of mine, and uh lady says, another lady says, uh, Oh, you look nice today, Bill, compared to the way you usually look. And I said, uh, yeah, I'm going to a funeral. Uh she goes, What would you like today? I said, uh, I'll have a triple espresso. She goes, I got this. And uh so then I'm confused. Now I'm like, okay, I got this. Am I putting my card away? Am I taking it out? You know, do I tell the story? Uh, because this was the manager actually. And I said, Okay, so here's my card. She goes, No, no, no, no, I I got this. I'm like, okay, was that the funeral thing? Was it me dressed up? What was so I need a I need some kind of rule book from Starbucks. So I got you, I got this. Uh yeah. So that's a rule book.
SPEAKER_00I will not uh well, you know what? This is the balance of the universe, is it not? I mean, this is how the universe is balanced. And you went to the same place and you didn't expect anything this time, and it came back around. So now you're even. Yeah. The way I look at it, you're even. That's right. Expect nothing. That's really the lesson there. That's a what a great lesson. Expect nothing. And um, you know, uh 327, I think is probably a little cheap for your coffee. I'm guessing it's more like nine bucks.
SPEAKER_01Well, well, I have two. I have two favorites. The least favorite is the 327.
SPEAKER_00Well, there is one 327. Oh, good. That's good.
SPEAKER_01So the um, and this kind of gets us into the lesson to the topic today is lessons we learn from people. Yep. And you and I were reminiscing a little bit before we started, and about all the characters that we've come across over the 20, 30 years that we've known each other and been in this business and been podcasting and been networking and the local community and all that. And we just rifled off like 10 names of people, and hopefully they're not they're not listening. We're not going to put the names out there. But it's just like, you remember him? Oh God, what what was going on with him? You know, and uh, so we thought we would do an episode on just what if what the the people of sales and how you run into all sorts, but everybody brings you a lesson. Everybody brings you something, even if it's not business, it's either a realization. Or I remember one time a guy uh stopped me and said, Don't ever chew gum in the training. It's that kind of thing. Like he was a client, but he wasn't paying much. But he he told me something that, like, you know what? That's right. I should not chew gum. So I thought we could reminisce a little bit and then talk about some of the people and the lessons we've learned from.
SPEAKER_00Uh, this is a great topic. Um, timely. So I'm gonna read uh snippet from a text that I sent to my uh second born and oldest son, my oldest is a daughter, Sam, who starts his first job today post-college, post-business school at uh Amazon. Great job. Great job. Hard job. Great job. And I said, in this long text, I'm gonna read the whole thing. Have a great day, one. I said, work harder and work smarter than everybody else. Second bullet says, learn from everyone. Third bullet says, see everyone as a human and as an equal. This is my advice to Sam. And then let mistakes teach you, and then let them go. And then some more stuff. But I I thought that's what got me thinking about that. Like you remember your first job and you learn from everybody. So we're gonna riff on that today. Like some learning, some people. Maybe we'll use first names, last initials. Yeah. Uh we'll see. Uh, can I start?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you go, and then I've got one that I told you about earlier, but I I think it's interesting. Go ahead.
SPEAKER_00Uh and I'm gonna use this guy's name as we called him. My first job as an intern was at Procter and Gamble. I called on grocery stores. Um, loved Proctor and Gamble, did not like going into grocery stores as my job. Just wasn't uplifting to me. And you had to go see the store manager back then. And at the um Mount Erie, Ohio IGA, there was a guy who was the general manager there named Larry. And Larry wore a suit every day, and it was the coming off the 80s, but he was sort of stuck there. He wore a leisure type suit. Oh like the old brown polyester, the old green polyester. So well, Larry must have had 40 of them. That's true. He had a different one for every day, and so I called him Leisure Suit Larry. We called him Leisure Suit Larry. Leisure suit Larry would never speak to a salesperson, and you would actually, and the way we were trained was to follow him around the store talking to him while he wasn't acknowledging that you were even in his presence. Oh my god. And I have never felt so uncomfortable and so like socially awkward, like, what are we doing? But what I what I learned from that experience was you can't force yourself onto people. Yeah, you just can't, and you shouldn't. And we were taught then, and this is like earlier, you know, this is many, many years ago. Uh, you know, that you gotta be aggressive, gotta go after him, gotta get after him, be the one that breaks down leisure suit Larry. And I'm like, no one's breaking this cat down, man. He doesn't want to talk to anybody. He's breaking us down, he is breaking us down, and he's winning. And I bet he, you know, I'm not sure he would still be alive just based on how old he was then. That would be like a record, but um the um he's still not talking to people. Still not talking. So it just you sometimes have to let people be. Yeah, and I wish I would have had the uh not. Sorry, it's clear that you don't want to speak to people like me. So I'm gonna leave and I'm never coming back. And I wish you lots of luck in your life, dude. I really do, but I'm not gonna bug you anymore. But that's not how we can do it. We had to keep going back and back and back and back.
SPEAKER_01Well, you would have gotten pushback from PC for that move, too. Massive. Um, I I thought you were going to say, with your sense of humor, you could have just, you know, the only aim is to make him smile. That's all and just you know, follow him around and say, you know, I could I think you're going to aisle three. I can help you. I don't know. Yeah, I can help you.
SPEAKER_00How's it going, Larry? You trying to be trying to build rapport with him, he just wouldn't talk. He's just like changing out the little tags, you know, the little yellow tags and orange tags. Oh, man. Funny. Leisure suit, Larry.
SPEAKER_01I had uh a sim uh not a similar, I had a situation where you and I were working together back uh years ago, and we got a proposal, uh request for bid or RFQ for uh training a group of commercial realtors. And uh we knew that to prepare an RFP was going to take hours and it was gonna go to the RFP you know hellhole and we'd never hear again. So we knew we needed to get to the kind of the main agent or the managing partner at this office, which was Indianapolis, which was a pretty good sized office. He had 50, 60 people. And we heard about the guy, the guy's name was Jeff, and we we were told that, oh, yeah, you ain't getting to Jeff. I mean, Jeff is like the he's brutal, he's brutal on salespeople. You know, you don't you don't want to, you know, send send the RFP in, and it might get to him, it might not be. You don't want to be around Jeff. And we're thinking, Jeff, man, this guy's brutal. I mean, what's he gonna do? Is he gonna beat us up or what? And so we were intimidated just based on what other people said. And I I've had other situations like that where, oh, you know, we gotta watch Brian, you know, he doesn't like anything from the outside. Then you talk to Brian, he's like, Oh no, I'm very open. He's like, Well, how did everybody get that impression? And Jeff uh has turned out to be one of my best friends over the last 15 years, and he retired from his position. And what prompted that is his daughter and my daughters were sorority sisters. Wow. And we were at a football game once, and uh I knew his daughter, and I said, Uh, your dad here? Yeah, my dad. And he came up and said his name, and I'm like, Are you with blank realty? He said, Yeah. I said, Oh my god, you're a you're a good guy. He goes, What are you talking about? I said, We were told you were a jerk. I'm not a jerk. So it it was funny and it turned out to be a great friendship, but you just cannot, you just cannot believe anything you hear, good or bad, about no, no, it's isn't it interesting?
SPEAKER_00And we we so often in sales make those decisions for other people. Like we we hear that you're not gonna get to them. And I said, Okay. So um, I will um let's see, God, there's so many people coming to mind, aren't there? So I'm gonna go to my um, I'm gonna stay at PNG for another person. Um, this guy's name was Bill Blair. I believe Bill has passed away also. Um was my first district manager, so like my boss's boss. And he loved intern, like he loved you know us and they had the energy and the old school PG. And um he was a uh very proud of his job and what he did. And uh he had a pen that he had where he wrote, he used to write all the orders, you know, like this pen's written, you know, $14 million worth of orders. He was awesome. But his assistant's name was Arlene, Arlene Orbagozo. And he, without saying anything, made her the most important person in our whole district without even doing the cliche, like after you plan a meeting, like you know, but but but the star of the show here is who did the, you know, did the patronizing. It's kind of cliche patronizing. Bill was not that way with her. She was his equal, his partner. She could boss him around. And I was raised, getting into my family heritage a little bit, um, the opposite of that. I was raised to think people at a level like her role was less than. That's how I was raised. Very wrong. Uh, not by my mom. I should say that by my dad. He he he uh treated what at the time would be a secretary as a less than, right? And I observed that, and then I observed the opposite from Bill. And I'm like, man, everyone's a human and everyone is an equal. And if you do that, all of this the up and the down, most people think about it down. I think about it up too. Like Jeff's just a guy, and he's just a guy. If you just get in your head, and I learned this from Bill, everyone's a human and everyone's equal. Just think that way. You'll have no problems in anything ever in business. And I learned that from watching Bill and Arlene work together, and they were just great human beings.
SPEAKER_01And you'll never have that that one up or one down disease where when I'm talking to somebody, even if you're, you know, maybe you're talking to a salesperson and you'd really have to be talking to the owner of a company, still, I mean, you you cannot you cannot dismiss people because that that salesperson may have more sway than the sales leader does, and may be, you know, the son-in-law of the you just don't know. You just don't, there's so much we don't know. Um, you know, I was gonna add a little bit to that today. Sometimes we look, if we've been in sales for a while, been in the business, let's say we're in our 40s or 50s, and we look at a young person who's 25, and we we can tend to look down on them because they don't know much. Yeah, you got to be careful with that. Yeah. Because what they do know is they know technology. And if they they are listening and constantly aware, they're listening to Gary Vaynerchuck, you aren't. They're listening to to you know, Brad Milette or whatever his name is, Brad Lee, and you're not. They're listening to people and you're not, and they're learning all this time. You think you know it all, they know they don't, and so they're trying to gather it. And what they're learning are new things. You and I are just reliving old things, and so be very careful about looking down on younger people, either inside your organization or just period. Uh there's some great, great young people out there. And uh I was uh I introduced my grandson. We were at Starbucks a couple days ago, and we had a little family outing there, and uh and there was there's a young man that works at the Starbucks named Joey, and Joey is a a Christian boy, he's 20, he's 20 years old, he's you know, in shape, just a nice kid. I mean, you look and just the way he interacts with adults is just like he's all world. You know, and so uh we were talking outside. I introduced him to Evan and I said, Hey, Evan, this is Joey, and you know, he's a good man, and Evan's gonna be a baseball player. Oh, really? And they talked for a little bit. And I said, Where'd you go to school, Joey? He said, uh, homeschooled. Oh course, there it is. Of course, there it is. Yeah, and I don't know how many homes now. This this is also dangerous that I'm starting to equate homeschool with a little bit more, uh, better conversations, yeah, a little bit more mature, because of me and they are. Yep. But I that that can also get me in trouble is when I start to assume things, even on the positive side. And so I thought that was uh fascinating. Yeah, because it's like, well, of course, why why did I not think that? So true. You got another one? Uh I don't, but let's let's let's come back next time. And let's do I think there's there's a steady stream of lessons here, and yeah, hopefully this is uh something more than just us preaching to you and lecturing to you. That there's some lessons, and you might think about your own world of of people and characters, as I call them, that you've run across over the years, and think about you know, that guy was a terrible boss, but what did he teach me about being a terrible boss?
SPEAKER_00That's right. That's great. Uh, be sure to go to join the insider program, advanced selling podcast.com. Uh look up insider, it's all over the place. They're on the website. Also, listener to advanced selling podcast.com, send us a quick little audio file just saying uh for our 20th anniversary that the party that Bill and I are throwing for ourselves, and just tell us about what the podcast meant to you, how you consume it, what you do, what you love, what you don't love. And listener at advanced selling podcast.com is that email. Just send a little audio file, piece of cake. Perfect. See you next time. Bye.