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Andy Shaw

SUMMARY

What do you think of as values and motivators?

Values are what motivate us on a more fundamental level, whereas motivators are what get us out of bed in the morning. Motivators can change over time and are frequently viewed as things like money, success, creativity, or security. Values serve as our compass for navigating life and interacting with the world.

What are the key inquiries one must ask oneself in order to find fulfillment while pursuing success, staying loyal to one's principles, and utilizing motivators to sustain drive and vigor even in the face of obstacles or failure in a position?

One should reflect on how things feel at any given time and determine whether their intentions and deeds are consistent with their ideals. If they see that they are engaging in behaviors that don't make them feel good, they should investigate the cause. When making decisions, they should also follow their instincts and feelings, and they should engage in self-inquiry to determine how their choices would affect their objectives.

Young salespeople just beginning out in their professions can seek coaching on how to enhance their decision-making and learn to trust their instincts.

Young salespeople should follow their instincts, learn from their failures, and communicate honestly with others. They should also seek mentor advice and exercise caution when approaching conservative persons who might try to steer them away from their intuition.

What constitutes a great sale?

The best sales have a decent margin, a good pricing, a good set of terms and conditions, and both parties give back to the community.

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TRANSCRIPT

Marcus Cauchi: Hello. And welcome back to The Inquisitor Podcast with me, Marcus Cauchi. Today, we have a great return guest many of you will have heard him in the masterclass on how to sell to CEOs, which is one of the top downloaded podcasts in The Inquisitor Series. His name is Andy Shaw. Andy, welcome.

Andy Shaw: Thank you for having me again. It's great to be back.

60 seconds: Background and what you do

Marcus Cauchi: Excellent. Could you remind people in 60 seconds of your background and what you do?

Andy Shaw: Yeah, sure. So I guess at heart, I'm a nomadic adventurer. I've been a salesperson, manager, leader, and default CEO entrepreneur at spirit. I saw my first business at 25, um, spent the last decade or so looking into personal development and doing learning after 10 years of not doing anything, post university, looking at personal growth performance, and, uh, and coaching of that.

Andy Shaw: From my own personal perspective, I'm working towards what I describe as an integrated life, which is essentially only doing things that I'm passionate about and combining all of those aspects of my life together. And I have a big focus on helping people achieve fulfillment and not just success.

How would you define each of them and what is the difference?

Marcus Cauchi: Let's kick off with that gnarly and fairly huge topic. Uh, how would you define each of them and what is the difference?

Andy Shaw: Yeah. So I think the ethereal description is that success is as an entirely an external thing and fulfillment is an internal thing. So to put that into, into some context, success is I define that as the achievement of a, a goal and fulfillment is the enjoyment of the achievement of the goal.

Andy Shaw: Uh that's that's the difference. So I think a lot looking at my own life and where this came from, I aimed at arbitrary targets as a salesperson that I was given. As a sales manager, I gave to other people hit those targets. Not always, but almost always. We can all hit targets if we've driven enough, uh, and found that achievement of just arbitrary targets or goals in your personal life doesn't have to be business.

Andy Shaw: The hit of adrenaline is a very short lasting thing. So you then try and have a larger goal and a bigger target and, and you try to try and chase something, which is not really there. I think fulfillment for me is align the alignment of the goal with your values and your motivators. So the things which mean that if you don't quite hit your target, or if you don't hit anywhere near your target, you've still at least enjoyed what you were doing.

Andy Shaw: You've done something that you were passionate about and then doesn't matter so much if you hit your targets. Yeah, sure, we all wanna perform. And elite performance is, is about hitting our goals, but to achieve fulfillment, I think your goals have to be congruent with, with who you are as a person and what drives you day to day.

Andy Shaw: So that's your values and your motivators.

How would you define values and motivators?

Marcus Cauchi: Okay. So let, let's take a little bit deep into values and motivators then, uh, and then we'll bring all. Tie it all together. Um, so how would you define values and motivators?

Andy Shaw: So motivators are the things that make you get out of bed in the morning. So not always short term things, but they, they did change based on circumstances in your life and without getting into the science of it.

Andy Shaw: They're in, they're in nine kind of key motivators in, in, in academia. And we are largely driven by those things day to day. Our values are kind of our bigger picture things. So motivators could be things like money or, um, success or creativity or security. Our values are things which tend to be our reasons why not, just, not just the things that pushes out of bed, but are, are bigger picture things. So my kind of key values at the moment are truth and honesty and, and really showing up as the best version of me that I can do each day. So people think of values often, and they'll think about, you know, like being a good person or not lying, or, you know, not stealing and there's kind of basic values, but when you dig a bit deeper, you can find out in different areas of your life, you have different values.

Andy Shaw: So my, my, my big thing is at the moment from a values perspective, is it is speaking my truth, which doesn't just mean not lying it means kind of being open and honest with people, having, having, uh, speaking my consciously, thinking about how people are gonna react to that, but, but being very open and very transparent with what I think and feel about, uh, any situation.

Andy Shaw: I think that promote promotes lots of discussions. So that's a high, high held value. Things that motivate me at the moment are I've got some growth motivators in my, in my, in my kind of motivational sphere at the moment. So I'm, I'm pushing lots of different bits of business forward. So I'm quite driven by that.

Andy Shaw: Not so much driven by security as I used to be. There's a bit of a Maslow shift there and, and, um, into more of a creative space. So I'm quite performance orientated, but I'm also ensuring that that's with within creativity and freedom, uh, are big motivators for me. So I like to, to do things which don't time me down and, and allow me to, to choose what I do.

Andy Shaw: So. That's that's how I see the difference that might be, people might say there's not much difference between the, the two sets, but, uh, I think it's, for me, that marks a, what I see as the difference between values and, and, uh, and motivators. Okay.

Questions we need to ask of ourselves in order to create fulfillment on the road to success

Marcus Cauchi: So if we think about tying all these together in terms of how we live and how we work and how we balance the two, what are the kind of questions we need to ask of ourselves in order to create fulfillment on the road to success while being true to our values and leverage those motivators in order to maintain the momentum and the energy, even when we hit roadblocks or when we fail in role.

Andy Shaw: Yeah. I think the, the overarching thing or the, the, the kind of one stop shop, if you like for, for me is how does it feel? So how does, what I, what, what, and I'm not particularly kinesthetic person, I'm not much more visual as a communicator. But this is quite this for me is about how, how does, how do things feel moment to moment. So if I set a goal and I really sit with it and, and write it down and read it back, how does that make me feel? Does it make me feel excited? Does it make me feel nervous? Does it make me feel a bit dirty or in, in, in, in a, in a, in a sense that it's kind of.

Andy Shaw: You know, not really align, doesn't, doesn't really align with, with my values. And then think about every, every action you take. How does that make you feel? So if you find that you're doing things, which don't make you feel good, then that then, then there's a reason for that. Now that might be a positive reason, or it might be a negative reason quite often.

Andy Shaw: If you, if, for me, if I listen to my, to how I feel about taking an action, so. Let's take, let's take this into, into a sales environment or into a, into a business environment. Let's use sending a proposal to a client. As a, as an example, we're often put into pressure by our business, by our leaders, by ourselves to send a proposal to a client.

Andy Shaw: I tend to use my instinct or intuition. I I'll listen to my feelings to say whether that's gonna be a, the right next action or not. How many times have we sent proposals to clients and it's not been what they asked for or what they really want at the time? We've just done it cause we wanna close the business.

Andy Shaw: So the incongruency between values and, and motivators and goals comes when you, you, you do something which is moving towards one, but away from the other. So that's that for me is very much feeling orientated. If I get nervous or I get this sense of foreboding around sending a proposal, I, I then explore two things.

Andy Shaw: One, is it the right thing to do for the client? And two, if it is the right thing to do for the client, why am I still feeling that? Is it because I don't have enough information? Is it because I'm scared of the outcome? And you can look at a positive sign, so fear or anxiety or, or these ease in internally can be, can be a good guide towards something that you need to look at in yourself, or it might be that you're doing the wrong thing. And I think if you do a bit of self inquiry at that stage, you can really start to understand. How that, how that's gonna impact, cuz quite often as salespeople, especially if we've got a few miles under our belts, we know instinctively whether our proposals are gonna hit home or not. Right? It's very rare you send a proposal like, and you go, I'm not sure that they're gonna buy this and then they buy it. I mean, that's just look sometimes. So they think there's you can do, enables me to do much less work in, in that sense and be a better closer. So I think closing is not necessarily about, about doing more or asking hard questions.

Andy Shaw: It's about doing things which feel congruent and, and there, and therefore if it feels right, just do it. And that's, you know, quite often that can operate not at the end of the sales process also at the beginning. Right? So you can use that in immediate conversation. You just met someone and a spark of it, a spark of energy goes off inside you and you think, oh, I should ask this question and then you bite down it cuz you think quite might be inappropriate to ask something very specific or very sales orientated right at the beginning.

Andy Shaw: But your intuition will quite often tell you what to do. Our DNA over millions of years has helped us intuitively. And I think as we've become the apex predator, we've stopped listening to that, that intuition in, in daily life. So that's a bit of kind of following my passion, following my instincts and really if it feels right, just, just do it.

Andy Shaw: And that's, that's kind of what that, that's what really holds all of those things together.

What are the fundamental questions that somebody at early stage in their career should be asking in your opinion?

Marcus Cauchi: Okay, that's fine for old fuddy-duddy fossils like you and I. But when you are starting out and a lot of the people who listen to the podcast are in their mid twenties to early forties. So they don't really have that, uh, depth of scar tissue and those reference points.

Marcus Cauchi: So what, what are the fundamental questions that somebody at that stage in their career should be asking in your opinion?

Andy Shaw: So I don't necessarily think you need heaps of experience to be able to trust your intuition. Um, I think you, with less experience you, you may make more mistakes. So I think if you, if you're in a situation where you get an instinctive feeling, and you wanna take action, but you're not quite sure because of a lack of experience, then you can definitely use, use a mentor or use your use your sales manager or, or somebody in your team to send, check that.

Andy Shaw: Or you mom and dad. I mean, I, you know, I still, I still use my parents to, to send, check some of my ideas and they, they, they do the same with me now cause I've got that old. But so I think you, you know, if you are not sure, you can ask. And I think that really is, that's probably the, probably the best advice we're gonna give to, to young salespeople, if it's not super critical.

Andy Shaw: So if it's, you know, if it's not your entire quota for the year, hanging on the line of your instinctive behavior to follow your instincts and learn from, learn from the reactions. So I think if your instinct tells you to do something and then you behave authentically with. With the other person's best interests at heart and are conscious and careful about how you communicate that.

Andy Shaw: I don't think you can. I don't think there's too many things that you can do to make indelible mistakes. I think people buy authenticity. If a young salesperson would, would come to me and be authentic, but be a bit, bit clunky or a bit blundering into it. I would, I would naturally give that person some leeway for that.

Andy Shaw: So I think it's trusting your instinct's a great opportunity to make some mistakes. Cuz let's face it, that's where most of our learnings come from our biggest learnings come from the things that we screwed up during, during our time. If you get some advice and, and, and be careful you ask us, you might ask somebody who's Uber conservative and, and pushes you away from your instincts.

Andy Shaw: I think it's good to try, right? So I think, you know, pick your environment, pick your risk out, measure your risk and, and, and follow your instincts in that as much as you can.

Identify people who you aspire to be like

Marcus Cauchi: The best question is who, who has already done it? Whose history represents a possible future for me? And I always used to run a, an exercise called a scavenger hunt, and it was to teach people about generating referrals and I would, uh, put 20 different types of people down for, and they would have to go around the room and ask lots and lots of different people.

Marcus Cauchi: Do you know anyone who? And only twice, I think in 20 years of doing this, did anybody come to me. Now, I was the person who'd created this exercise. So I was the most logical person to come to, but most people only ask people that they know or they're comfortable with and experiences taught me that if you reach out to people and ask for help, many, not all, but many will give it.

Marcus Cauchi: And one of the best exercises that I think anyone can do, but particularly early in your career is identify people who you aspire to be like, or to emulate their success and ask them and say, "Andy I'm after a huge favor and you're welcome to say no. I'm looking for a mentor and my promise to you is this, I will always come prepared. I'll take no longer than 20 minutes a month. And I will come with one question that I cannot resolve or answer myself. And I'll bring at least three ways that I tried to fix this problem, uh, myself, so that you can help point me in the right direction. Then I'll take your advice and I'll come back and I'll tell you what I learned and how it worked. And if at any point you wanna fire me, you're welcome to do so."

Marcus Cauchi: Now when people have done this, it's not a hundred percent, but a very large proportion will say yes to this. And you can do this with a dozen or so people. Now, if you have a dozen mentals each giving you 20 minutes of their collective wisdom, you know, when, when you you're approaching people our age, you know, they've got 30, 35, 40 years experience.

Marcus Cauchi: Then 12 times 40 don't, you know, that's just shy of, uh, 400, uh, 500 years of experience collectively. You're not gonna get that just by beating your head against the wall, trying to resolve it. So it requires some intellectual humility. It requires the courage to make yourself vulnerable enough to be rejected.

Marcus Cauchi: But it's not personal if they reject you. More often than not, it's cuz they're busy and you don't have a right to it. But what's really interesting is just how many people want to help.

Humility and vulnerability

Andy Shaw: That's such a good point. And I think I didn't necessarily have the humility that I, I needed to learn the lessons quickly in my, in my younger years.

Andy Shaw: And, and I, and I wish I'd asked more people. I get people asking me, if I can help them. And I always, almost always say, yes, if I've got time. If not, I can give them somebody else who can, can help them better. Cause I'm not always the best person to answer the questions. And, and that's, you know, if somebody does say no to you and you be, and you've asked for help, then you know, ask them, ask them, they can recommend that you.

Andy Shaw: They might know if they can't, if they can't help you directly. So I think having that, like you say, humility is, is really important. Vulnerability, I think we need to be vulnerable as salespeople. And I think that that warming and brings down the guarded relationship between the buyer and the seller.

Andy Shaw: If you can, if you can share some vulnerability, even if that's just saying that I don't know is an answer to their que to one of their questions, let me find out for you. But you going back to the, to the mentor thing, yeah, I think, I think everybody should have mentors. I mean, I've still got several people who I use for different types of mentorship.

Andy Shaw: Some are in some are younger than me. And I think we can leverage that as kind of more mature professionals or, or people that have been around a little while. I've got some, I've got one mentor who is a student. Um, he's still doing his degree and, uh, it gives me lots of different perspectives if we don't have a formal relationship of, of mentor mentee. But I see him as a mentor and he gives me lots of insights into how teenagers twenties think about things and, and talk to me about tech and various things that I'm interested in. But I don't have the time to come make 10 years of mistakes to find, find all that stuff out. So you asked before, what questions should they ask? And, and as you were talking there, a question came to mind that actually might be worth just exploring.

Andy Shaw: I think if you ask yourself, what do I want to achieve? What is my actual outcome? Then work back from there. That's really, that will give you the steps to take action. So rather than if you're in a corporate environment, what have I been told to do? And that's kind of cuz quite a lot of times we do things because we get told here's the process.

Andy Shaw: This is what works. Follow this through. And I think processes are there for a reason cuz they generally work. But I think you also have to be intuitive enough to know which step steps to miss out, which steps to go back to which steps to do out of order. And sometimes several of those processes steps can occur all in one go.

Andy Shaw: So if you've got your actual outcome in mind and it in a congruent way in a, in a kind of fulfillment way needs to be, am I doing the right things? Am I creating a good outcome for myself and for the other person? Rather than can I hit my target and that's kind of, there's some congruency in that. And there's some, there's some humility in being able to understand that, that there are different ways to do things I think.

Andy Shaw: And, and that's

Marcus Cauchi: Another really important question is why did we start doing it this way?

Andy Shaw: Yeah.

Marcus Cauchi: And is it still fit for purpose?

The "Holding the Horses" story

Marcus Cauchi: There are far too many processes and systems traditions that go unquestioned for far too long. And many of you who listen to the podcast will remember the holding the horses story.

Marcus Cauchi: So basically for 60, 70 years after horse drawn artillery, uh, was being used in the field, soldiers were marching back and holding an imaginary horse. Now very often you'll see systems and processes that have been built up over time. And they had a purpose once, but contextually they're no longer appropriate.

Marcus Cauchi: And we see this with a lot of, uh, software companies that have moved over to what they call SaaS Software as a Service. But it's still sold as a three year license. And so it still feels like, uh, a drive by shooting because the salesperson doesn't have to maintain that constant engagement. They don't treat the customer as a paying prospect.

Marcus Cauchi: They treat them almost as if they are entitled to that business. And they only show up when there's either a problem or renewal conversations to be had. And the net result of that is they're not staying close enough to their customer. And I, I see the same thing happen in management. Just do it because I tell you to is not a good enough reason for anyone to do it.

Marcus Cauchi: And the best managers I know are inclusive. They encourage everybody to have a voice. And they encourage the team to work collaboratively together. And so I do have a question for you actually, which has been buzzing through my mind a lot recently, which is, is what passes for great in sales fit for purpose in the modern environment?

Marcus Cauchi: And if not, what does great really look like?

Great sale: Good margin, a good price, and a good set of terms and conditions

Andy Shaw: I think instinctively, I would say no. I would struggle to define or struggle to hear what people define as, as greatness in sales. I think far too many people talk about greatness in terms of internal numbers. So sales outputs, how much money we made, how much go to we made, what difference we made to the EBITDA, all of those kind of questions.

Andy Shaw: Uh, I think the, what great should look like. I think that's a, that's definitely a matter for opinion. My opinion on that, I guess, is that win, win or win, win, win scenarios should always exist in greatness. I think you can't be great if you are making somebody else less than they were to get there. So I think value for me, or wealth or value is created by giving everybody a piece of the pie or by enabling everybody to do better out of it. So greatness in a sale should for me, should be a good margin, a good price, a good set of terms and conditions of fulfillment of the, of the process of the order. For their client, it should be that they are receiving a product which are a service, which helps them, which they're happy with, which it enables them to do what they want to do and feel that they've got that at a price, which is fair and reasonable, or if not, good.

Andy Shaw: And then furthermore, I think the, the really important thing, which kind of squares this circle is that both of those, for greatness, both of those organizations need to be doing something which is giving back to the community at large. So if it's a, just a transaction between two people, you could have great transactions.

Andy Shaw: So good transactions. I think what makes it great is that those companies are then doing something which benefits the rest of the world or their community or somebody else or something else downstream on that. And that's, um, that doesn't have to be. All businesses are, you know, green energy or, or they're, they're looking at sustainable futures or things like that.

Andy Shaw: There's, there's places for every type of business. So I'm not, you know, I'm not picky on that. But I think everybody can do something in their business to give back. And that's kind of that's that for me would be greatness where both buyer and seller win or see, see that as a win. And then there's an, there's an onward win two ways from those companies.

Andy Shaw: So the companies are better. And the community is better for that, that transaction that might just be employing more people. Right? I mean, that, you know, could be as simple as that, but if we all do a little bit of good during that process, I think we can, that is a self fulfilling prophecy. It's not, there's not socialist.

Andy Shaw: It's not kind of, it's not a very, it's not a charitable thought process. It's just about how can we make our environment better? Whether that's the environment or our environment or our community.

Best salespeople are collaborative

Marcus Cauchi: I love what you're saying there I'd build on that, in that the best salespeople that I'm seeing evolving now are incredibly collaborative.

Marcus Cauchi: They're collaborative internally. They're collaborative with partners. They're definitely collaborative with their customer. They have a long term view. They're not transacting to hit their quota this, this month or this quarter, when they're prospecting, they're prospecting for a customer, who'll be a customer in 5, 10, 15 years time.

Marcus Cauchi: They have a partnership mentality. They understand that their job is to work with the customer to evolve and develop solutions that will be fit for purpose today, tomorrow, 10 years from now. And that they are masters at creating strong and sustainable agreement that weathers the test of time. That can survive, change that survives adversity.

Marcus Cauchi: And they are you, you talked about outcome. And I think I'd go one step further, which is that their commitment is to helping their customers be successful, helping their partners to be successful, helping their team members and coworkers to be successful. So it's all about service. And I think for them to do that, qualities like reliability, relevance, responsiveness are absolutely key. And we don't see enough of that. I think they also need enormous amounts of courage that a lot of salespeople are afraid of confronting customers who are overstepping the mark or challenging them. And I think that a huge element that really needs to be integrated into the development of, uh, salespeople and manage it, is listening. Genuine deep surgical listening. So that you are listening, not only for what is being said, but what's not being said. Reading between the lines to understand the intent and the motive behind what's being said and how it's being said.

Marcus Cauchi: Developing business acumen is really key. In my mind, far too few salespeople in their early stage of their career are given any exposure to the moving parts in a customer's business. So all they have to rely on is features and functionality of the product, which, um, you know, from our last interview, uh, clearly makes them irrelevant because unless I understand the impact that the decision you are going to make is going to have not only on you, but all the different departments, your customers, your partners, your suppliers. Then it makes it very difficult for me to deliver genuinely effective, valuable solutions. And so the unholy pressure that new salespeople and junior salespeople are put under to get that first deal over the line.

Marcus Cauchi: I don't think they should be speaking to customers for two or three months in certainly in an enterprise or a complex sale. I think they should be learning that stuff and really learning how to listen and listen as a whole body experience, not just to the words, but with their gut, with their heart, with their mind.

Marcus Cauchi: And you, you should be hiring people who are high on trust and have a high degree of empathy and emotional intelligence.

Courage in sales

Andy Shaw: I jotted down empathy as you were, as you, as you were speaking there. So there's a couple of, couple of things to pull out of that. I think specifically for junior salespeople or people that people are fairly new into the career, or don't necessarily feel that, that confident, I think the courage, courage, is an important word that you, you mentioned.

Andy Shaw: I think that courage for me in, in sales is, is not about, I'm a brave enough to ask for the business. It's about, am I brave enough to believe that I've got an equal relationship with the person that I'm sitting next to. So that whether that's a CEO or whether that's a buyer or whether that's somebody, a functional line manager that you're selling to, you've gotta be able to have the courage in your own convictions that you are of value in that conversation.

Andy Shaw: If you don't have that, if you feel like you are subservient. Or you are there as you know, there is a necessary evil for that person, that mentality will, will come true, that outcome between your body language. So when you talk about listening as being a whole body experience, that's really true. So you, you actually use your eyes to listen more than your ears because 80% of, of communication in person is, is, it comes through the body language. So the words don't necessarily matter that much that are coming outta somebody's mouth, it's it's often the body language. But clearly, tonality and, and when you've only got audio, which is ironic, cause we're on a, we're on an audio podcast, but there, then you listen to tonality and pace and cadence and all those kind of things.

Andy Shaw: So as you said, listening is a whole, whole body activity, but in order to be able to, to, to listen, well, you've gotta feel it, you, that you you've gotta a place at the table. So get that courage and confidence, be professional, believe that you should be there and then sit and listen. I think business acumen is fairly easy to, to acquire and that can be done by listening.

Andy Shaw: And then just if you listen, well, then you can, if you're not, so there's two types of listening. There's people that listen, well, there's three types. There's people that, that listen and talk over people and, and they're not really listening, which is, which is kind of not listening. Then there's the listening where people just are listening while, it's their turn to speak. So they're just waiting for their turn to speak and they they've already made up their mind what they're saying before they, the other person's finished speaking, which is really, you don't have fantastic sales conversations if you do that. Because you've got an idea of what you wanted to to say before. You really, you need to listen deeply to where that the conversation's going for people who are fresh into sales, whether they are younger or not, or just.

Empathy can be a great replacement for business acumen

Andy Shaw: Developing their own business and need to sell their own products. Empathy can be a great replacement for business acumen. If you've got empathy and you're listening to, to what the other person's saying, and then you can just articulate some interesting questions so you can have some stock questions, like, "Okay so why, why is that important to you? How does that affect you? What's the outcome?" And you can let them give you the business acumen training that you need. Clearly, you need to understand a little bit about how business operates, but I think if you can have that empathy and a great question is that you can ask yourself is "What's in it for the other person" ?" So what's in it for them that can really help you ask good questions at that stage. And, and sales for me, successful selling is about listening and asking good questions and that's it, because then it becomes what product or service you offer them, how you pitch your proposal. They've just given you all the answers to that.

Marcus Cauchi: One simple habit that every salesperson and every manager, I mean, frankly, every human being needs to develop is the patience to listen to the end of what someone has said and not try and formulate your question while they are talking. Then pause for three or four seconds, which is normally plenty of time to formulate your question.

Marcus Cauchi: And even up to 7, 10, 11 seconds. It feels like an eternity, but the reality is that it leaves space for the other person to continue talking. And if your lips are moving, you're probably not learning a lot. So your job in the sale is to learn. It's not necessarily to teach. You deliver the best insight by delivering the best questions. Over the last 15, 20 years, I've learned that my real value is in the quality of the insightful questions that I ask my prospects and my customers. And in doing that, I help them see their world through a different lens. And then it becomes their information. And when it's their information, they don't fight it. They'll argue with me till I'm blue in the face, but they're not gonna argue with themselves.

Marcus Cauchi: And that patience to listen to the end is normally or often where the golden nugget gets dropped. Because if you are thinking about your next question whilst they are talking, you're not actually listening. Now, interestingly enough, in the state of sales report that LinkedIn produced at the end of 2020, the number one gripe, the number one gripe that the respondents had was they wanted salespeople to listen better and more.

W-A-I-T : Why Am I Talking?

Marcus Cauchi: And It really is a superpower. It's ironic that shutting the fuck up, um, is, uh, the most desirable skill in salespeople. And there is an acronym. Wait, W A I T why am I talking? If your lips are flapping, you're not delivering real value to that customer because what they really need to do is work out 80% of the solution themselves and where your real superpower comes in is in helping them to tile that thinking together and add the 20% that they can't fill in themselves.

Andy Shaw: Yeah. A hundred percent agree with all of that. And I think, uh, I thought you were gonna talk about the STFU acronym there, but the, I like the way it went better. I think practically for everybody who was listening. A good way to test your own ability to listen. Cause I think a lot of people might think, oh, you know, I they'll either see themselves and they go, oh yeah, actually I have done that.

Andy Shaw: I do. I do sit there thinking, what's my question while you're the person's talking. So you're not really learning, but a great test of listening and learning is to is can you strawman somebody else's argument. So can you listen to what somebody's saying about a subject that you don't necessarily. Know, anything about or agree with, uh, uh, if, if you debate him and then when they've spoken for five or 2, 5, 10 minutes, can you summarize their position back?

Andy Shaw: Or can you summarize what you've just heard? And, and that's a, you know, in sales, that's a, that that's a, a real skill. So if you want to show the, if you wanted to show yourself, you've understood you summarized them what somebody else is. So they'll talk for a few minutes and say, okay, so what you're saying is, It's important to listen.

Andy Shaw: And that's, you know, that's basically the, the, the subject that we're talking about. Can you repeat back in a concise form what someone's just said to you? Or can you straw man can you take their argument? So Buddhi monks spend in their training. They'll spend 10 minutes talking about why they believe that God exists and then they'll, then they'll spend 10 minutes arguing why God doesn't exist and they'll have to, they'll have to do that over and over and over again. And I think that's really the ability to listen and understand someone else's point of view, and then to, to Ted on board, because you will get a different perspective. And if you are patient enough, like you, you mention there that the golden nugget comes out of that.

Andy Shaw: The amount of times I've had a conversation with somebody. I think they're gonna ask me for business consultancy or I think they need business consultancy as a service, or they need some strategy work doing and what they, during the conversation, they'll say something and it'll be. It'll be so obvious that they need, they just need a mentor.

Andy Shaw: They don't need someone to help them in strategy. They just need someone to, to bounce their ideas off and say, look, I'm struggling with this. How do I get past this? Or is this a good idea? This is what I should do. They can do the strategy. They just need someone to, to, to reinforce that with them. And then I, so I ended up with mentoring people rather than doing business consultancy with them.

Andy Shaw: And, and likewise often. So in my own personal development journey, I went to my, to my coach at Bevis minor, who you've had on the, had on the show. He and I have been friends for, for a very long time. I went to him about probably eight years ago and said, Bev, I know you're into this coaching thing. Can you help me with my business?

Andy Shaw: I'm a bit stuck in my career. Um, and I'm not really sure where to go. Eight years later, we're still working together. 99.9% of what we do is personal development. None of it's business oriented. I didn't have a business problem, had some things in my own psyche and some things that I needed to get, let go, some limiting beliefs, some, uh, some social conditioning, some things which I I've just done the way I'd.

Andy Shaw: Done them and, and were blocking my progress. They were blocking my progress in business and in my life, but it was my personal things that I wanted to needed to, to get rid of. So if you listen very carefully, the client will always, almost always tell you what you need to know. If they don't tell you, you've not been in rapport with them. So when we're talking about listening, listening is a great time to generate reports. So you match in and mirroring the body language you're focusing on their eyes or, or I quite often focus on people's mouths when I'm listening to them, but I'll remind myself. Keep checking between the mouth and the eyes.

Andy Shaw: Cuz you can see what's going on in the, if you look into the, into the eyes, you can see whether they're engaged or not. If you're in rapport with the person that you're selling to or buying from, if you're a buyer, then you'll get a better solution. The conversation will flow better and everything will be much easier.

Marcus Cauchi: And tie that with what your gut is telling. It's so important to be aware of your physiological cues. And so again, something that every salesperson, every manager, every human being really could develop is a deep understanding of the signals that your limbic system is giving you. That tells you whether this is something that is good or bad or neutral, and it should give you a sense of whether or not this is something that fires up your passions, makes you nervous and uncomfortable or leaves you feeling like there's something wanting there is a gap and so pay attention.

Attention is a currency

Marcus Cauchi: Attention is a currency. My friend, Ron Voporist, uh, taught me this, uh, you pay attention. And the problem is that far too few people pay attention to the response or the reaction that's going on inside them, because they're fixated on the outcome that they want rather than paying attention to the other person and really understanding.

Marcus Cauchi: Because, unless you understand what it is they want and they're trying to achieve. And as Andy said, you know, often they come to you with one request, but that problem or that outcome isn't really, what's the right thing for them. And our job is to be a great diagnostician. I've got four opportunities in the pipeline at the moment, and they came to me for one particular type of service or solution.

Marcus Cauchi: And I've slowed the whole process right down. Because, after having done the preliminary diagnosis, it's extremely clear to me that what they were after would not deliver the real desired outcome. In one case over the next five years, we have to determine whether or not we are going to be able to sell the business and in what form, and they have three different, uh, exit routes.

Marcus Cauchi: But each one requires different outcomes. Now with the thing that they came to me for, yeah. We could get maybe 30% of the way there. But in digging deeper, we've realized that there's an issue around alignment across their entire revenue operations. There's an issue with recruitment. There's an issue with the talent that they do have.

Marcus Cauchi: There are questions over whether they can grow into the roles that the business is going to need in a year, three years, five years down the road. There's a disconnect between their marketing and their audience. And so, as a result of that, I'm now thinking about a much bigger pathway that involves me bringing in strategic partners. But it will deliver not only the outcome that they want, but probably bring it forward maybe two years and that's formulating in my mind.

Marcus Cauchi: And the only way I could do that is by slowing the process down and by engaging at different levels. So in order to, uh, to verify my, my thesis, I have to now go and speak to several people within the organization. Again, this is a small paid project, but what it'll do is it'll give insight into where the gaps are and it will help us to map out and co-develop a solution.

Marcus Cauchi: Um, and but through that collaboration, we end up getting a significantly better outcome for the client. And that then forms a partnership. You know, that's a three year, uh, program that might involve at least half a dozen of my partners and touch pretty much every part of their revenue operation.

Andy Shaw: That's such a good point. I think what we're talking about there is it is shifting goals, right? So you've got a high value of optimal customer outcome in your behavior as a, as a seller. So you are working on, you are working on your value set of, of can I deliver the optimal outcome and yeah, you set off with a goal and it might have been to forget what the exact goal was, but it might have been to repair the business for sale in three years or five years or whatever, but then it becomes, you have a discussion.

Aligning goals, values, and outcomes

Andy Shaw: You talk about the motivators. So what what's, what's driving, what's driving that change and you, you realize that actually you need to to fix the, the internal conversation first in line with the values. And then that, then the goals change along the way. Sometimes the goals get bigger. Sometimes the goals get smaller, so, or the outcome gets smaller.

Andy Shaw: So if you do it congruently, and if you do it with your values and your motivators in line, you'll end up happy with the outcome, right? So you'll end up feeling fulfilled with the outcome because you've stuck close to, to what you do. You, you, the client will always get the best that, that, that you can offer them if you, if you can do it that way.

Andy Shaw: So if it's a, there's a set, if you're aligning your, your sales tri triangle of, you know, goals, values, and, and outcomes, then, if it's got other people in mind, then, then it usually is, is beneficial. That doesn't make everybody feel great. Right? So I know plenty of sales, people who have gone, "Screw the client, I wanna make as much money as I can now." That is not necessarily the kind of sales I would like to be involved in. The methodology works. Be respective of what your values are. So there's no judgment on the values. You just need to pick people that have got the right kind of values for you for on your organization.

Andy Shaw: And you need to pick clients that value that have got similar kind of values too. So we've got clients in, in one of my companies. We just basically let letting them. We letting the client go because they don't value our partnership. We value in my recruitment company, we value long term partnerships. We value high margin.

Andy Shaw: We value quality service, quality staff, quality training, and we value relationship with our clients. And one of these clients tried to steal one of our staff without telling us that just doesn't align with our value set. So we'll, we'll, we'll let them move on and we'll, we'll, we'll put our service somewhere else.

Andy Shaw: There are plenty of people in that space who just want transactions. They just want staff, they just want their own business outcome. And, and they're just, that's fine. They're just not, they're just not aligned a aligned for us. I think it's as a seller, you need to be able to. Does this client align for me?

Andy Shaw: That's part of your good instinct, you know, and, and if not, then how do you get the optimal outcome? You know, don't just walk away, necessarily. Work on what's optimal for that.

Strategic partners to grow and scale

Marcus Cauchi: In this particular case, probably first year, 70% of the revenue will go to my partners. I could do that work, but they are much better at it than me. And for the customer's outcome, which is a critical value for me.

Marcus Cauchi: Which is that you deliver the outcome that the customer needs and wants and find the best people to do that. I would much rather that revenue went to my partners and you're absolutely right. Just because you can doesn't mean that you should. And I, I think one of the, the mistakes that selfish salespeople will make is they will try and keep all the revenue.

Marcus Cauchi: They will try and keep all the cache and the credit. But what I've learned as I've got older is that it's now unimpossible to grow less than 10 X, if you are using strategic partners, because whilst my partners are doing that work and delivering the outcome that the customer needs and wants, and I'm priming that relationship, I'm able to go off and do other things as well.

Marcus Cauchi: So it allows me to scale, uh, you know, the, the way, um, scaling has been defined for me is that you grow exponentially without having to do additional work. Why would you choose to do all the work single handedly? It, it strikes me the, like, you know, the credo of a masochist.

Andy Shaw: In the spaces that I deal with that's, that's actually a really pertinent thing. There's a lot, there's a lot of people selling time for money or, you know, trying to scale their, their coaching or training businesses. That's really challenging if you try and do all of those things yourself, I have to say personally that I've not had tremendous success in the organizations that I've worked with previously in my corporate life with channel partnering or with, with, with partnership selling.

Andy Shaw: That is definitely something that I am keen and willing to explore and, and having been brought into your community, that's something which, um, I've seen and been exposed to some, some people who have done it super successfully, and that's, that's really something that I'm trying to learn at the moment.

Andy Shaw: And, uh, it's something that I'm very much, um, keen to know more about and, and engage with people who are in, in that space, doing that successfully wanna circle as much information as possible on that.

Marcus Cauchi: Ha- happily introducing these folks as well. Andy, unfortunately, we've got to wrap up. How can people get a hold of you?

Andy Shaw: Yeah. So you can go to, to, uh, my consulting website, which is oneparallel.com or you can email me if you want to get in touch@andyoneparallel.com. I am Andrew Shaw on Facebook, on LinkedIn. I think they're probably the, the best channels.

Marcus Cauchi: Excellent, Andy. Sure. Thank you.

Andy Shaw: Thank you.

Marcus Cauchi: So this is Marcus Cauchi signing off once again from The Inquisitor Podcast.

Marcus Cauchi: If you happen to be the owner or CEO of a tech company in the 10 to 50 million revenue range, and your goal is to grow your business exponentially and achieve genuine sustainable compound hyper growth. And I'm talking 200% year on year over the next five to eight years and develop a highly engaged and highly productive revenue operations. So marketing sales, customer success, account growth, uh, channel, and you wanna keep your customers for decades. Then let's have a chat. You can email me marcus@last-laugh.com or direct message me on LinkedIn. Now, Andy and I are both involved in founding a global community called "Sales: A Force for Good."

Marcus Cauchi: And our mission is to remind us that we exist because of, not in spite of the customer. To remind us that selling is a service profession and to raise the bar in sales and sales management. And to make sales an aspirational career choice and to create great conditions for the next generation of salespeople and sales leaders.

Marcus Cauchi: So if you're interested in that, check out the hashtags S A F F G for sales of force for good, hashtag pro customer and hashtag buyer safety. In the meantime, stay safe and happy selling. Bye-bye.

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