• 34:28
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
sales, book, people, parable, years, bob, gave, read, relationship, jeff, audible, endless referrals, write, insurance industry, berg, small, kim, friend, favorite, music
SPEAKERS
Jeff West, Damon Pistulka
Damon Pistulka 00:01
All right, everyone, welcome once again to the faces of business. I’m your host, Damon pistulka, and I am so excited for our guest today, because I can’t really believe it. We’ve got none other than Jeff C West here, renowned author, speaker and international sales and leadership coach, Jeff, thanks for being here today.
Jeff West 00:25
Oh, Damon, it’s an honor to join you on your show. I appreciate it very much.
Damon Pistulka 00:30
Yeah, man, I’m so I’m so excited to talk today because very, very seldom I get to talk to people that have helped as many sales people as you and in the ways that you help them. So let’s start out like we always like to on our show and learn a little bit more about Jeff. How Jeff got into sales, and then how did you make that jump into into sales, leadership, coaching and off being an author?
Jeff West 00:58
Well, thanks for the question. Such a great question. I actually, I knew I wanted to be in sales from the time I was born. I went to college and got a degree to be a band director, just to prove it, actually, I have two degrees in music, a Bachelor’s of education, Bachelor of Science in Education, with music business major, and then a master’s degree in music composition. And I’ll tell you, those two degrees and a $10 bill will get me a cup of coffee at Starbucks. It really will. But my wife, I got married during the middle of my master’s degree to my high school sweetheart, and she had been going to school in Alabama, and I was in Texas at the time, and so I promised her, I said, I’ll get you back in school in the fall, and I did, but that myth, I was doing it at a time where there really weren’t any teaching jobs open, so I ended up in sales, I often say, by accident, but in my opinion, it’s more divine intervention, because it was such a great thing. I met on that first job. I met a man who literally changed my life and how I raised my family forever. It’s just that good of a person. And then so I started off in musical instrument sales. Went into the industrial uniform industry, all this happening in Georgia, and then back in about 1989 that company was one of their top three salesmen in the nation, and they wanted me to come to Texas and start a branch out here. So that’s what I did. Unfortunately, a couple of years later, we got bought out, and it’s funny that that time that I stayed with a company that bought us out didn’t work out real well, and I want to blame everybody except the guy that I shaved, but the truth is, it’s always the guy that I shaved responsibility to make things work. And so I did that for a little while, but then I ended up going self employed from that point forward, that was about 93 and I was in the insurance industry. I was actually with a very well known brand in the in the industry of Fortune 100 company, and worked my way up through the ranks. And at the 10 year mark, I became a state sales manager in Texas, and did that for the last 10 years that I worked in that industry, and I had decided that I really wanted to go ahead and retire from that and writing has always been a passion. And I was, happened to be really good friends at that point with a guy named Bob Berg. I know you know him. Most of your audience does. And he just, he gave me such great encouragement about the book, because I sent him a copy. He was kind enough to read it, even though the man’s so busy he can’t say yes to everybody. But he was very kind and such a good mentor to me. And we’ve just become brothers over the years, so we do a lot of things together now, even
Damon Pistulka 03:39
that’s so good. So that was a big jump you’ve been in. You’ve been on your own for quite a while.
Jeff West 03:44
I have I don’t think I would work well as an employee anymore, Damon, because I’ve had a saying forever, and I’m cleaning this up for your audience, but it’s I’d much rather shave the boss’s face and kiss the bosses. Oh yeah, yeah. So I don’t know that I would be a good employee. I’ve had companies reach out to me for vice presidents of sales positions and things, and I don’t know that I would be a good employee, because I could just see me now, somebody who’s really not who gets, well, has kind of a process that they normally do that’s a little bit pushy. And I’d be saying, I don’t think so. Sparky, yeah, probably get fired anyway. Yes,
Damon Pistulka 04:16
yes. So you, you said, then you’ve, you’ve written several books, and you, you’ve always liked to write. Before we got on, you talked about you always had a passion for writing. When did you first realize that you had a passion for writing? Because I That’s not normal. It not like we don’t just see people jumping up and saying, I had a passion to write, and that’s why I wrote a book.
Jeff West 04:41
Well, you know, it’s a great question. The bug started with me in high school, a small high school, and I had an English teacher that was very encouraging. I haven’t had things get published in this the like the yearbooks and things all that nature would be different. Yeah, things that would be. Doing. So that’s really where it started. And then in my career in the insurance industry, I used to with my leadership team every Monday, I would send them out a coaching email for a long period of time. I did this where I would tell a story first, and then I would pull a lesson from the story. I was doing an email that was basically a sales parable when you get down to it. And so it was really just, I love the creative process. That’s probably why I also got the degree in music composition.
Damon Pistulka 05:29
Yes, how many you said small high school? How many people did you graduate with?
Jeff West 05:34
When I graduated, they had consolidated two small schools to make one bigger school, and that gave us about 200 or so. But before that, I had less than it would’ve been less than 100 in my class. I think my sister’s graduating class had about 80 in it. Oh, wow, yeah, that is smaller, yeah.
Damon Pistulka 05:51
So you really had practice, though of you were sending out these coaching emails every week on on what later became the way you wrote books because you talked before we got on that you write. Wrote in parables, right, right? Did it just make sense to you to write in teaching those, those kind of stories? You know,
Jeff West 06:11
I think it was intuitive to a certain degree. My favorite way to consume content, because I became a student of sales. When I got into sales, I began reading books back when I was 22 years old to get better. And I naturally have gravitated to the to the business parable, to the sales parable, and like augmentinos books and John Damon and Bob burgs books, things of that nature, because it it the story sticks with me so well. So as I began, right, I write a lot of nonfiction as well. Haven’t put a lot of books out that way, because most of my nonfiction goes out in my coaching emails, and I send out each week to people that follow me. But the whole process of writing a parable. It touches people emotionally different. But when I’m doing sales training, I’ll talk about fusion points and basically, to make a long story short, when people are making decisions, or when including the decision to consume content or to retain it and use the lessons, they’re going to make a decision based on the way their brain works. And you know now we make decisions. Your emotional part of your brain communicates with the logical part of your brain. It produces the decision. If it’s a negative emotion, you want to get away from it, you’re not going to move forward. But if it’s a positive emotion that you’re hooking with that logic, it’s it’s the next step happens. So once people get exposed to the parable that tends to be one of their favorite ways to learn, and, more importantly, because of that connection, they retain it and they’ve got a better chance to apply it.
Damon Pistulka 07:48
Yeah, yeah. That is the it is very interesting how the the your mind makes a diff a decision to purchase something, right? It really is. It really is. And the parables, I agree. So what? What is other than your own? And we’re gonna, we’re gonna get the titles of yearbooks. What is your favorite sales book to date, ever?
Jeff West 08:12
The Go Giver.
08:13
The Go Giver.
Jeff West 08:14
Read it a couple times. Yeah, it’s funny. Uh. Damon, I when I read the Go Giver, I’d already read endless referrals by this point. I already knew Bob, yeah, and I were already friends when they came out with a book and endless referrals changed my career, and basically Bob Berg and John David Mann turned Endless Referrals into the parable The Go Giver and but it’s just Endless Referrals itself literally just about saved my career. It’s just it was, it was that strong. And I know you’re only having a 30 minute show here. I could, I could talk about that all day, but let’s
Damon Pistulka 08:49
talk about just for a moment. Why? Why do you think that really changed your career that much
Jeff West 08:54
at that point? This was January of 2000 when I got the book, I had a sales mentor. He was the state manager for Texas at the time, up in north Texas area. He gave me two books, January review time or, you know, okay, how’d you do? And at this point, I had been one of those district managers who would make my numbers one year, miss them the next. I wasn’t in danger of getting fired, but I certainly was no star either. He gave that day, he gave me John Maxwell’s 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, and then endless referrals by our friend Bob Burke. Now I’d make no bones about it, those books changed my trajectory, my trajectory. And it wasn’t that they were really about the insurance industry, but I applied the principles in there. Yeah. So my career really began to take off. Two years later, I went from district manager to regional manager. Two years later I went to state manager, a four year jump like that’s really quick up to that position, and it’s funny, when I was a regional manager, one day, my administrator buzzed him. I had been going to the training schools for every month when they would bring in new agents to that. Company, I would be one of the people who went in and talked to the school. And I would always talk about Endless Referrals all the time to everybody. Well, I got a phone call. This was probably 2003 maybe, and my administrator buzzed in and she says, there’s somebody on the phone for you named Bob Berg. And I thought, sure, I got a friend pulling my leg right now, I know what’s going on here. And so I take the call, and Bob says, Hi, Jeff, this is Bob Burke. And I said, and I’m quoting, sure it is fella. Bob said, Excuse me, this is really Bob Berg. He said, Yeah, this is really Bob Berg. And so I told him, yeah, what I just told you? And he and I became friends that day. It was just, it was amazing, but he it was, it was one of those lives serendipitous moments.
Damon Pistulka 10:52
Well, yeah, because now, you know, 2021, years later, 20 plus years later, you guys are doing a lot of business together. Do a lot of stuff together.
Jeff West 11:00
We do, and, you know, we’ve got, we had gotten to where we talked back and forth about sales a lot anyway. And he, he was, he actually had sent me an email my second book had come out. It was a book called, said, the lady with the blue hair that I co authored with Lisa Wilbur, who is Avon pious producer in all of history. Amazing lady anyway, and Bob had sent me an email about some sales thing he was going to put on LinkedIn. He said, What do you think about this? And so I replied, but at the very last sentence of his email, he said, By the way, save this when you and I do our parable. This could come in handy. Now I we’d never discussed a parable at that point. So I emailed him back with what my comments about what he was going to do, and I said, Oh, and by the way, if you’re serious, yeah, we’re doing this
Damon Pistulka 11:50
nice, nice well, and it’s interesting that he talked about a parable himself, and you like to write the parables, and how that worked out. Yeah,
Jeff West 11:59
it’s, you know, it my favorite part is the fiction. My goal, Damon, what I get through if a reader tells me that they couldn’t book, couldn’t put the book down, or if they tell me it just, it moved them in some way. And when that, when I get those, that feedback, because people will email me and I encourage it. It’s, it’s like the best feeling in the world.
Damon Pistulka 12:23
That’s awesome. That’s awesome well, and it’s, you know, as someone who I listen to Audible a lot, I walk, I walk the dog a lot, and and I listen to Audible, and they’re just such, there’s such a difference between a parable and a business book or a leadership book or something like that. The parables are so much some like you said they’d really draw you in, and you can feel the emotion in it, and you can feel how things happen. Yeah, you
Jeff West 12:49
know my one of my favorite ways to consume this book. I’m one of these guys. If it’s a book I really like and I want to get a lot out of I’ll often get it in every format. I’ll get it in audible. Because when I’m in my vehicle, I’d rather be able to listen to a book. I won’t listen to radio if, if I’m on an airplane, I’d rather have it on my phone so I can read it on my phone, so I’ll get the ebook. But if I’m taking notes, I want it hand in hand. I want I want to have it in front of me so I can write it and so. But I think my favorite form on street wise to sales wise, though, that I did with Bob, I think it’s the audible, because Bob and I do it. We, he did it in a studio in Florida, I did it in a studio in Texas, and then we made the magic happen after that. Yeah, it sounds like you’re sitting beside your mentor learning something. And I just love that,
Damon Pistulka 13:37
yes, yes. And that’s, that’s so cool when you when you use multiple formats, I don’t get the the like Kindle kind of version on my phone, but I do, I do the the written version or the paper whatever, for sure, and the audible. Because just like you said, you can listen to it, you can read it, and you get a whole different perspective reading it than you do listening, but the together, you really get a more complete knowledge of it. I think
Jeff West 14:06
you really do when you’re listening to it and reading it. Of course, when you’re doing an audio book, you have, especially if it’s got a narrative and a fiction in it, you have to script the audio book a little bit differently, you know, like, like in a print book, I could put something in parentheses, and you as the reader, know it’s the thoughts of the character that you’re reading about. Well, you can’t really do, you can’t do or not parentheses in italics, yeah, italics on an audio book, so you have to, you have to change it up a little bit, you know, you know, Damon thought, and then say what he thought?
Damon Pistulka 14:37
Yes, that’s interesting. That’s really interesting. Yeah, never thought of it. The technical details in this are really something, really something. So as you’ve been, I mean, you’ve been helping people for a bit now with sales. And you know the title today is talking about helping people beat the helping sales people beat the sales blues. You.
Jeff West 20:00
Be a little bit more relaxed, and they’re prospecting a little bit more relaxed. In sales conversations, there’s you get that. And I started it off telling a story about when I had a little hot wheel when I was a kid, and I would go speeding down the sidewalk, and it’s like I could hear the music Born to be Wild, and better than I started off telling a story about how much fun that was just to not care, just go do what I was doing, and then I roll that around into prospecting and sales conversations.
Damon Pistulka 20:31
Yeah, yeah. I just read something about that and the importance of getting yourself ready to start, to start, start your day and start if you’re in sales, of the importance of getting ready to go like that and give you mindset.
Jeff West 20:46
Most salespeople actually hate the first five or six calls of the day, but if you get yourself kind of pumped up with your favorite music or whatever, and you’ll get through those faster. And then after, after the first five or six, everybody’s fine. Anyway, not everybody that you should never say everybody, and you should always not do that. People generally are fine after the first half dozen or so.
Damon Pistulka 21:07
Yep, that’s that is. That is how it works. Exactly what they said in the in what I was listening to that yesterday, I believe so you have, you said the lady with the blue hair. You wrote that one, then you wrote the unexpected tour guide. Yeah, it
Jeff West 21:27
actually came first. It was I published that first, and then blue hair was published in 22 okay,
Damon Pistulka 21:33
sorry, I did not out of there, but you’ve won some awards with this. Did you, I mean, did you? Did you think
Jeff West 21:41
that you think that you were going to be an author? First of all, never thought I’d make a living at it. So that’s been a wonderful part of life that came together in my life, actually, but getting the accolades on the book, the first one, we actually, my wife and I lived in New York to get to receive the award in person and all that. And we have the second ones with blue hair. It was everybody got out of that habit of going in person during the covid year, so we didn’t go then. But actually, street wise, just one won an award not long ago too. It was just named as a finalist in the American indie Excellence Award. So,
Damon Pistulka 22:17
very cool, very cool. I just think it’s, you know, your passion starting, like you said in high school, going all the way through, and then turning it into being an author, and in an author of parables too. Business parables and sales has to be really fun, because you’re just living your dream, kind of It’s
Jeff West 22:36
a joy. I’ve never it’s funny. I have been extremely blessed to work with some great companies, to have a career that I can move up in. But I don’t think I’ve ever been more fulfilled and happy than I am right now. And it’s a combination of the writing I’m still doing speaking, you know, we do, we Bob and you know, Kim, Angeli and I, we all do an event, but and I do some coaching, but my happy spot is when I’m sitting in here go writing storylines and making a book work.
Damon Pistulka 23:07
Yes, yes. And you said you’ve got a fourth one in the works. So maybe we’ll see that next year. Maybe
Jeff West 23:12
sure they come out next year with a gentleman named Bill Kate, who is absolutely awesome. His branding is the original referral coach, just a genuinely good person and smart as a whip,
Damon Pistulka 23:28
very cool. So what we talked about this before we got on, but you guys have something called sales wise live coming up in September in West Palm Beach, September 22 to 24th what’s that going to be about?
Jeff West 23:42
Oh, thanks so much for asking about that. Bob Berg, Kim, Anjali and myself. We, the three of us, do an event in West Palm Beach. We did our first one in June. We’re doing the next one September, 22 through the 24th and then we’re our plan is to try to do them quarterly, probably, but it’s a two day intensive sales mastery workshop, not something where you’re just having speakers on a stage and you take notes and you clap them in your nights and all that. No, no, no, we are in the audience with you during this and we’re working on things. And when we go over something, we say, Okay, now let’s take let’s get this done. It’s more like a sales training, sales mastery workshop. This last one, we had people small businesses, like attorneys that were working on building their practice that came to it. We had real estate agents. We had insurance sales people. We had, we had a billionaire there, and I’m not making that up. I’m not giving his name up, but we had somebody who’s has got so many businesses, and he wanted to be there because he wanted to experience what we’re doing. But we take people at whatever level they are, but we we teach them some concepts from Bob and myself and Kim, and we help them make connections while they’re there like crazy. And so our that’s our goal. And then this next one, oh gosh, we got it. We got a big deal coming into that’s a friend of the three of ours and now. And it’s kind of Richard Wildman. And are you familiar with Richard? He is. He is one of the world’s leading experts. It gets booked more often than any speaker I know on the subject of creating a customer experience that just turns your client into just outrageously positive advocates for your brand. And he’s actually going to come in and do a little segment for us on Monday. We start on Sunday night, basically with dinner where we have everybody come in and it’s just fun, and we’re every meal. We don’t go hide. We come out there and have the meal with the audience, but the it so we do that on Sunday night, and then Monday and Tuesday is the actual sales conference itself. But it’s people, the the people who have gone, some of them are even coming back, which is a nice, awesome three months later, when we come back to an event they just went to, we’re enjoying that. It’s wonderful. But we try to keep it kind of intimate. We’re not going to, we’re not going to try to fill a coliseum with this. We try to, we limit it to somewhere we’ll probably have 50 or 60 people at this next one, but we want it to be the kind of thing that we can dive in there with people and get that? Yes,
Damon Pistulka 26:22
well, that’s a good size group too, with with three people, and you can have group, I’m sure that’s a lot of fun too. It
Jeff West 26:30
is. And West Palm Beach is amazing. This, this last one, our venue where we were up on the top floor the hotel, that they can vary where we are as a rule, but we were this one, we were on the top floor, and we’re looking out the glass windows at what other kind of windows they would be, I don’t know, but we’re looking out the windows at the inter coastal waterway and huge yachts in the Atlantic Ocean at Palm Beach out there in the distance. Oh, it, it’s a it’s an experience. I used to always take my sales team on trips. And like, I would take the top 40 producers and their spouses on the cruises and things. And I would, I would do things like, I take my management, the regional coordinators that reported directly to me when I was a state manager. Every year, I’d take 10, 20% of my bonus, and we’d go on a trip with that money. And so if we had a great year, it was a great trip. I took them to the to the British Virgin Islands, and we spent a week at the bitter end Yacht Club. I mean, I’ve done good things for them, but taking your team to a place where you can go somewhere nice and you can build a bond at the same time you’re learning something. It’s, it’s the kind of thing that gives teams outrighteous loyalty.
Damon Pistulka 27:43
Yes, yes. So as you’re, as you’re talking to sales leaders today, I mean, we asked, asked you about the, you know, as a salesperson, it’s, you know, getting to the the conversation with the decision maker. What do you think sales leaders are facing when they’re looking at their teams, keeping them trained, motivated and high performing.
Jeff West 28:06
Sales leaders will always face the same challenge, depending on whether it’s commission only or if it’s salary with some perks on top, especially in the commission only world, they face two problems. Number one, people are scared to come on board. Number two, the turnover can be high because there’s no safety net. But if you can get, if you can implement the what we teach in Florida’s a whole lot based off our street wise sales Wise Book, but my part of it is fusion points. I give people a peek under the under their own skull, basically under the hood, so they know how a brain works when it’s making the decision to do business with you, or even to even say yes to the meeting. And so I equip them on that as far as prospecting and sales conversations and leadership. And then Bob and I together through the segment on becoming objection proof. And then Kim. Kim is amazing. Kim does this segment where she teaches people how to once you’ve got a client, how to never come off their radar. She says, it’s not your client’s job to remember you. It’s your job to become unforgettable. So those are the kind of things that we teach there, and that’s what sales managers have to do with their team. And you’re building a team, you gotta equip them on what to do, but you’ve got to build the relationship with them and keep that in front of them as a carrot and making things happen. Because if you don’t, if they if, even if they can make money at it, if they’re not happy, are you going to lose them anyway? 20 years of my life, I let a volunteer army in the insurance industry, so I think you learn what works? Yes, sales wise, live.com, is that website to bring their team there?
Damon Pistulka 29:47
Yeah, that’s right. And the website for that event is sales wise, live.com, if anyone’s interested. So, and that is again, September 22 the 24th and West Palm Beach. It’s going to small, a small, intimate group. You’re going to be working with Bob Berg and and Kim. What’s Kim’s last name,
Jeff West 30:04
Angeline,
Damon Pistulka 30:05
Angeli, together, we’re going to be helping them. So with the groups working in there, sounds like a great time. So as we’re as we’re kind of getting in the we’re coming down to the home stretch here. What are some of the things that are exciting you in the sales world right now?
Jeff West 30:25
What’s exciting me right now is going to seem odd when I first say it. What’s exciting me is the fact that over the last who knows how many years, the process has become this disjointed, and people are trying to to make a sales process happen without relationships. They’re trying to do it through mechanized systems. And there’s nothing wrong with tools. We should all use all the tools that are at our fingertips, but the relationship side has gotten pushed away somewhat, and not intentionally, but out of us, out of a sincere desire to make things work quicker or better or whatever. But the reason I’m excited about that is now you only have to be this much better in the relationship building business and focus this much more on their needs and not your quota, to look hugely better than everybody else in your marketplace, that’s what I tend to coach people on,
Damon Pistulka 31:23
yeah? Because that is true. That is true. I mean, you see it. We see it every day. How many times you get pitched a day? How many times that you get called a day? Yeah, I think my phone, you know, I saw, if I go back, I probably had at least five, and I five or six, including texts and everything else, and, oh man, it’s just, it’s crazy. And you’re right, you only have to be a little bit better than than everybody else to stand out. And if that card goes down,
Jeff West 31:52
it’s better for us. That’s exactly. And there’s, there’s a, there’s a term I love. It’s called London. It’s a occasion term which matches my New Orleans book. So, I mean, that’s there. You may notice a pattern here, but lanya is basically, if you were to give it a real definition, it’s probably giving or paying a little more than is expected or required of you. You know, back in the days of the general stores, when people will go in and they would buy a five pound bag of salt or flour or whatever. The person would put it on the scale, put put that amount in there, but then they take a little small scoop, and it always give them a little extra that’s called a lanya, and they southernize Everything. So I would say lanya Is that little extra that makes everything mo better. So it’s the same thing with the relationship. You just all you have to just be a little bit you make a few more calls, you get a little better process. You establish a relationship a little better. You become a superstar.
Damon Pistulka 32:51
Yes, that is very true. Very true. Well, I tell you, Jeff, it’s been awesome talking with you today, man, I just really appreciate you stopping by, and I’m, I’m excited to see the next book come out. I’m in the middle of your, your latest book, sales wise, or street wise, to sales wise, uh, becoming objection proof and beating the beating the sales blues. I can’t even read. I’m getting tongue tied here, man, but it’s so so good to get to talk to you, because, yes, your your aura, your experience, and the the ability to really help these sales people go to the next level, I think is super cool, man.
Jeff West 33:36
Well, thank you so much for saying that, and thank you so much for having me on likewise. I’ve enjoyed our
Damon Pistulka 33:42
time. All right. Well, if you got in on this late, get back to the beginning and listen to Jeff from the beginning. We appreciate you listening to us. Stopping by and listen to us every week, and we will be back again next week. But before we leave, I want to make sure that we say it one more time if you are interested in talking to Jeff, you go to Jeff C west.com Correct, correct. And if you’re interested in the sales wise live event they’ve got coming up in September or one of the future events, go to Sales wise live.com and check them out. So thanks everyone. We’ll be back again with another episode of next week. Bye.
