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S5 Ep02: Jill Konrath on Turning Pivotal Moments into Opportunities
86 Plays1 month ago
In this episode of Dial It In, hosts interview Jill Konrath, a renowned sales strategist and bestselling author, about her new book 'Pivotal Moments.' Jill recounts her journey in sales, the advice that inspired her career pivots, and the importance of viewing challenges as opportunities for growth. The discussion highlights how pivotal moments can lead to significant life changes, urging people to view such instances as triggers for personal and professional developments. Alongside, the episode is sponsored by 'WeFixHubSpot.com,' a service aimed at optimizing and customizing HubSpot portals for businesses.
Connect with Jill:
Pivotal Moments Book https://JillKonrath.com https://www.whatsreallypossible.com/ LinkedIn
…
Dial It In Podcast is where we gather our favorite people together to share their advice on how to drive revenue, through storytelling and without the boring sales jargon. Our primary focus is marketing and sales for manufacturing and B2B service businesses, but we’ll cover topics across the entire spectrum of business. This isn’t a deep, naval-gazing show… we like to have lively chats that are fun, and full of useful insights. Brought to you by BizzyWeb.
Links: Website: dialitinpodcast.com BizzyWeb site: bizzyweb.co
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Dial It In' Podcast
00:00:08
Speaker
Welcome to Dial It In, a podcast where we talk to fascinating people about marketing, sales, process improvements, and tricks that they use to grow their businesses. Join me, Dave Meyer, and Trigby Olson of BusyWeb as we bring you interviews on how the best in their fields dialing it in for their organizations.
00:00:26
Speaker
Let's ring up another episode.
Introducing Special Guest Segment
00:00:28
Speaker
Happy New Year.
00:00:32
Speaker
So we're skipping around a little in our seasons, because I know we've had some AI episodes that we're or deep into our AIs, but then there are certain people that when you get them to agree to be on the podcast, you just let them do let them say, when is good for you? And so we had one of those people today. um Remember when we had Dan Tyer on, Dave?
00:00:55
Speaker
I do, delightful human. I asked Dan, who is who's the person you go to when you have sales questions? And that's our guest today. so Dan is?
00:01:07
Speaker
Yeah. yeah Yeah. It's you, Jo. Oh, you're talking about me. i thought you were talking about Dan was going to be here. No, he's the guy he calls when he can't figure something out. She's got a new book. I looked through the praise for the book and it's just, it's a murderer's row of sales spirit animals. Sherry Levitan.
00:01:27
Speaker
loves the book. Fred Diamond loves the book. Brett Adamson, author of the challenger sale, loves the book. Mark Roberge, the first, the founding CRO at HubSpot loves the book.
00:01:40
Speaker
So it's, it's going to be a great conversation today. So I'm super excited because I have been a religious reader of our guests. blogs for going on almost 10 years. Excellent.
00:01:52
Speaker
Do we have a sponsor for today's show? We sure do. We are actually brought here today by WeFixHubSpot.com. Is your HubSpot cluttered and inefficient? WeFixHubSpot, powered by BusyWeb, specializes in customizing and optimizing your HubSpot experience.
00:02:08
Speaker
Our team of certified experts offers tailored solutions, including training, re-onboarding, architecture reviews, and data restructuring, ensuring your portal aligns perfectly with your business needs.
00:02:21
Speaker
Don't let a disorganized HubSpot slow you down. Visit wefixhubspot.com to schedule your complimentary consultation and start transforming your HubSpot portal today.
00:02:33
Speaker
All right. If you are driving a car, put on a seatbelt. If you are in an arena, you will not need your whole seat because you're only going to use the edge of it. Our guest today is Jill Conrath.
Meet Jill Conrath: Sales Strategist and Author
00:02:47
Speaker
Jill is an internationally recognized sales strategist, speaker, and bestselling author whose books have reshaped how modern salespeople succeed.
00:02:56
Speaker
Her groundbreaking titles, colon, I'm going to read a list because it's lengthy. Selling to big companies, snap selling, agile selling, more sales, less time.
00:03:07
Speaker
had become And that's not all not one big title. That's five six books have become go-to resources for sales teams navigating today's fast-changing business landscape. Jill's work has been featured in Forbes, Fortune, and numerous global media outlets, and she's advised organizations ranging from fast-growing startups to Fortune 500 companies. Known for her focus on simplifying the complex sales process and boosting productivity, Jill helps leaders and sellers thrive in a world of distracted buyers, shifting priorities, and constant change.
00:03:40
Speaker
Her new book, Pivotal, i'm going to say Pivotable like 100 million times, so sorry to the editors, Pivotal Moments. expands on these themes with fresh insights for the next era of your life. Welcome, Jill Pryor- Thank you for having me. It's fun to be here.
00:03:57
Speaker
o All right. and that was a lot that That was a lengthy list. I want to ask because you've been a lot of people's North Star and learning how to sell with humility and heart for so long. And this new book has changed for you. So what was the pivotal moment that inspired you to make this change?
00:04:16
Speaker
It's a real different one. Yes, it's a real different one. What inspired me to make this change and go in this direction is I had started writing a fiction book. And it was that in itself was a new challenge for me and something I was going to do different. I had a concept and I was working on it and having lots of fun. And then one morning and one night, in the middle of the night, I woke up and a voice said to me, I come first.
00:04:45
Speaker
And I'm sitting there in bed going, what? Because it literally was a voice in my head speaking. i come first. And then it said, pivotal moments.
00:04:57
Speaker
And at that moment in time, I knew it was my job and my assignment in life to focus on pivotal moments because so many people are going through pivotal moments in their lives
Pivotal Moments and Life Changes
00:05:08
Speaker
right now. The country's going through your pivotal moments and there's so much going on. And what have I learned in my many years of being around is I've created and lived through a lot of pivotal moments. And so that's what I tackled that assignment. And that's what got it all going.
00:05:26
Speaker
Wow, and I didn't know that there was authorship when you wake up with thoughts in the middle of the night. I'll need to keep a pen and paper by and my bedside. Maybe you should, because you never know what's going to happen. i Yeah, and I'll tell you, before I wrote Selling to Big Companies, I had read a book called Your Highest Goal, and it said before you start any project, make sure you ask yourself, what is your highest goal? And I was sitting down to write, it was my first day tackling Selling to Big Companies,
00:05:54
Speaker
And oh, shoot, I forgot to ask the question. So I asked the question and I went, my highest goal is to teach small and medium-sized businesses how to sell to large corporations. That sounded right. And then
Dealing with Imposter Syndrome
00:06:08
Speaker
the only other time I heard that voice came rolling in, it said, no, it's not. And I went.
00:06:16
Speaker
And then the voice said that it was my job to make people feel that it's possible.
00:06:25
Speaker
It's a whole different book if you're writing to show how smart you are and how you've conquered the world in sales. And most salespeople had written books about, aren't I wonderful? And I did this and that. And this one was to show, in selling to big companies, to make people feel it was possible, which meant I had to reveal all my vulnerabilities and all the times I screwed up so I could say how I learned to be successful, as opposed to coming straight on like I was this hot shit stuff.
00:06:54
Speaker
I love that distinction. And i think as we look at, especially in your new book, he' got thinking about what's really possible and to that next level, I think clarifying questions are probably one of those clear things to help you identify that. Just as you looked at certainly this book and driving forward for folks that read and that are looking at their pivotal moments.
00:07:22
Speaker
How do you tune in to that voice? I don't know how you tune in. i think you just open yourself to wisdom. I didn't expect it either time, but when it came, I heard it.
00:07:38
Speaker
I saw that the message was deeper than I was able to think of myself. so It was interesting to me. Let me ask the question in a different way, because I think most salespeople who follow you and want to lead with heart and lead with a certain amount of authenticity, which means that you're on the line with every deal. And getting back to that late night session of waking up and hearing something and as a clarion call,
00:08:08
Speaker
but How would you recommend, especially to salespeople, when you hear that, how do you hear that versus avoiding the noise that I think all salespeople have of imposter syndrome, of not listening to the negative?
00:08:26
Speaker
I think this is great for you that you heard this and you changed and you pivoted and created them. So how can I follow you? I can't answer about getting up in the voice in the middle of the night. I can really say, though, that one of the things I learned is that if you're struggling and you're new in something, that you don't just don't know how to do it yet. And to see yourself as a learner, you know, who can get there. You just haven't. I used to say to myself all the time when I was in sales, I just haven't figured it out yet. I'm not a failure. I just haven't figured it out yet. And doing that was...
00:09:02
Speaker
relieved me of my angst, but it also moved me from feeling like an imposter, like I was doing something icky and selling or whatever. It allowed me to open to new ideas and to try something else and to be curious, which to me is real important to stay curious.
00:09:22
Speaker
I'm like listening you say that I'm a little shocked because I think for a long time, I've had that mindset of, it's not that I don't know how to do it. It's that I haven't learned yet. Yeah.
00:09:33
Speaker
And I'm sitting here wondering, oh my God, did I get that from Jill? You might have. It's in a couple of my books. Yeah, absolutely. Wow. That's so amazing to be here and talking to you about it. You have this notion of it's time to pivot and it's time to change. What did you do with it? what In your case, you wrote a book. but What do you recommend in the book on...
00:09:54
Speaker
how people can follow that voice into making the change for them. I don't think everybody gets the voice. I think they get the moment that they have to make new decisions. And a pivotal moment is just a, to me, it's a trigger event in your own life that says, hmm, it's time to change. And you may be, there's so many different things that are happening. Like I said earlier, people are losing their jobs. What happens if you lose your job? You have to go forward, but how? And you have to stop and say,
00:10:22
Speaker
Allow yourself some stuff and give yourself some grace, too, because some of your pivotal moments aren't your fault. They're being at the wrong place at the wrong time. But I would say, too, though, there are other pivotal moments where you just have to, again, open yourself up to being the learner and to figure out what it is and to throw yourself in. and to me...
00:10:43
Speaker
The one thing that I spent most of my career doing is experimenting to see what could make things better. How could I change what I was doing or saying so that I got a different result from the one I just had? if my And I never meant to do it in a manipulative way, but if I had something that was valuable and could help a prospective customer, I needed to figure out how to talk with them better, have a conversation with them better. And I would write questions down before I had conversations. If I was meeting with a prospective client, I had my questions there and I'd pull them out to make sure that they I was there to respect their time and I thought about And these are some things that might be helpful, but it was all thought out.
00:11:29
Speaker
And it's like being a student of the profession and keeping yourself alive and learning. And I've been through different iterations of my own business and had to stop and learn and grow too. So I'm not relying on everything I learned 25 years ago. I'm still growing. you And I'm stepping into an arena I haven't played in before.
00:11:50
Speaker
So that's what it can be exciting too. And I do choose to define it as an adventure. I feel like that's probably incredibly important as you're pivoting through any pivotal moment or how you frame your reality. And i so I think especially with the way the media tends to treat things and if it bleeds, it leads or in our click economy.
00:12:18
Speaker
Yes. The more, you know, this one crazy thing is the news all the time or you won't believe and they're trying to generate all of these negative emotions because that's. Oh, yeah.
00:12:29
Speaker
Yeah. How would you counsel folks that have found themselves in a pivotal moment to bring themselves into that positive space and to start moving forward? Because I think a lot of times we feel stuck. And so how do you unstick and set your sights on that positive horizon?
00:12:48
Speaker
i think I really think you have to catch yourself doing and say, is this okay? Is this how I want to go forward? Or do I want to do something differently? Because, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that are going on. There's a lot of angst in a pivotal moment. And I don't know, for me, like I said, I'm...
00:13:05
Speaker
always use experiment it's an experiment i'm trying new things i'm trying to grow i'm moving myself forward and i thought there is grace in that that you are going to be better but you just haven't figured it out yet and that kind of thing it's like it's not it's like letting go and opening yourself up to what's possible yourself as opposed to some narrow vision of i have to You don't know.
00:13:34
Speaker
Let me just say a personal thing. My my late husband died in 2016. And after a year and a half, i needed to I knew I needed to move because my house was too far out and there weren't other human beings by me.
00:13:48
Speaker
And so I could go, since I work at home office, I could go days without seeing anything. a person, which I didn't think was healthy for me. It's like, that's not good for the soul because you need community. And so I decided I would move downtown and get a condo where there at least I could see a person in person going in the elevator or something, but my kids were real opposed to it. They said, oh, mom, your memories are all here in the house and whatever. And I said, no, you guys, my memories are inside me.
00:14:19
Speaker
And so you don't have to worry about that. And then they'd say, what if you don't like it? What if it doesn't work out? and And I said, you should rent. And I'm saying, i don't want to rent because if I rent, I'll be constantly saying, do I like this?
00:14:34
Speaker
How much do I like it? And I wouldn't throw myself in. I'd be an evaluator of it. Instead, I told my kids, ah yeah're I'm going on Jill's urban adventure.
00:14:44
Speaker
I have no idea how it's going to turn out because I have never lived in a downtown area before. But I'm going on this adventure. And if it doesn't work out, I can always go to plan B. But I'm going give it a shot.
00:14:59
Speaker
And they went, oh, an adventure. But it was an adventure. And I didn't know. And it turned out really well. I'm just, I'm having a moment because when you talked about your kids, because my parents were college professors and taught argumentation, professional communication and speech and debate.
00:15:18
Speaker
Yeah. And I'm just
Aligning Work with Personal Passions
00:15:20
Speaker
having a moment of sympathy for the kid whose mom is Jill Conrath and tried to sneak one by her when she literally wrote the six books on how to sell.
00:15:30
Speaker
God bless your children. Cause I I've been there when the person literally has read the whole manual on how to do things. So, well, my son is in sales and he's doing really well. and Yeah. Well, what do you surprise me?
00:15:47
Speaker
Oh, okay. So back to, back to those pivotal moments that we're talking about. Yeah. I think the key thing, like you said, is recognizing is it. Cause it's a pivotal moment. You talked about, and is this really what I want out of life? There are other ways that you can help us understand how do you identify what that moment is before you start you doing something like that.
00:16:07
Speaker
Yes. I'll give you a couple examples from my life just to make it more concrete. When I started my own consulting business, I did sales training. And after about a year in doing sales training, and I'm a former teacher, I thought it was logical, sales and teaching, do sales training. After about a year in the business, I went, I hate this.
00:16:33
Speaker
I hate it. Why did I hate it? So I had to say, it why do I hate it? And the answer was, I can't do the same thing over and over again. Okay, that's what I had to define. I couldn't do the same program over and over again, and I was really bummed out. And then at ah a pivotal moment, I was walking across the parking lot, and I ran into a friend of a friend. I'd only met him once, and he said to me, how's it going, Jill?
00:16:59
Speaker
And I said, I don't know what I'm going to do. I have no idea. I've been doing this for a year and I'm burned out already. I can't do it anymore. And I said, I have a real low boredom threshold.
00:17:12
Speaker
I'm bored. Repetitive things over and over again. I learn things quickly i and figure things out. And then I like to share them with people, but I'm doing the same thing. And he looked at me, said, Jill, I'm an HR consultant.
00:17:25
Speaker
And What you have, the ability to learn things quickly and share it with people, is an asset and it's your biggest strength.
00:17:35
Speaker
And I'm going, what? My boredom? I'm thinking I don't have a future because I get bored so easily, but he redefined how I thought of myself. That was fascinating to me, what he did.
00:17:47
Speaker
And within six months, I totally transformed my business. So it took me... in a direction I wanted to go. i I mentioned earlier, I worked on product launches because all my clients were I worked with lot of technology driven companies and it was really fun to have to launch a new product because it was, I had to learn the marketplace. I had to learn the product. I had to learn about the buyers and their business issues and what sales training program that they had.
00:18:10
Speaker
And then I get got to pull it all together. But I was in my area of, I love this. This is fun. So you go back to, you know, your question. What kinds of things do you really like to do and how can you create an environment around you, whether it's in work or at home or even just in your community involvement in things that you're doing?
Decision-Making Strategies
00:18:30
Speaker
How can you create an environment that gets you interested and excited about it and... Arthur Brooks, I don't know if you know who he is. He's written some books. on He's a happiness expert at Harvard.
00:18:43
Speaker
And he's gotten some really good books out. And he said, if you're thinking about doing something, ask yourself. but yeah He has a formula. It's called the 75-25 formula, where if it excites you, if it excites you,
00:18:58
Speaker
and That's 75% of the decision. If it excites you, this could be fun. This might be interesting. This is a big journey. And it's 25% fear. And he said, fear is good because that means you're growing and it's you're not just moving. You're growing and a little bit tepid about what's going to happen. But he said, if you have any dread at all, don't do it.
00:19:20
Speaker
Don't do it. Because dread will only drag you down. and When I was a teacher, dread. When I was doing sales training, dread. I moved into a whole new thing. i was like, oh my God, I'm a kid in a candy store. This was so fun.
00:19:33
Speaker
And do you think, Jill, the difference between just regular fear of the unknown versus dread, is it like how it sits in your gut? Yes. Yeah. It's how it sits. Okay. Yeah. Like I am, I could not wake up in the morning if I had to do this every day. I to go do this kind of job one more day listen to that person.
00:19:53
Speaker
Whatever it is, or work with that boss. It could be so many different things. And I think it's important for people to accept and embrace that just because you're a little nervous about something, that's not a roadblock.
00:20:08
Speaker
Not a roadblock. I'm sure yeah we already talked about this. You've been up on stage a lot and you've talked to large groups and done large trainings and things in that moment right before you step on stage or before you step in front of a large group of people.
00:20:22
Speaker
Um, like for me, it's a focusing and like that adrenaline, it's important for me to reframe that what would be stage fright into this. This is just hanging on to the live wire of life. And all of a sudden everything is more clear and exciting and all of that. So reframing it from like fear and nerviosity. I don't think that's really a word, but into excitement. Nervous. It's in the word is nervous. It's just.
00:20:50
Speaker
Nervous dishes. Yes. it's Beautiful. So if you can reframe your brain to say, it's okay that I'm nervous, yeah then you can, and that's excitement.
00:21:03
Speaker
It's not really, it's not a hard thing. Yeah. Yeah. I know when I first published my book, I got my idea for selling to big companies to write it. And I was preparing a proposal and to send to the publishers and it said that you had a much higher chance of getting a book published if you were a speaker and i literally went oh right yeah i hate speaking i hate speaking i could do a classroom of 30 people but speaking in front of this huge audience it was like the last thing in the world i wanted to do however
00:21:41
Speaker
I joined the National Speakers Association and started going to
Facing Fears: Public Speaking Journey
00:21:45
Speaker
apprentice class in terms of what is speaking and how do you build a business around it, and I got myself out there. I didn't do it because I wanted to speak. I did it because I was in service of the book.
00:21:57
Speaker
If I wanted the book to impact a lot of people, and that was my goal, to help people and help more people, then I had to learn to do something I didn't want to do. Isn't that weird? So yes, I became a speaker. I don't hate it anymore.
00:22:13
Speaker
Isn't that just like when the why is powerful enough, the hop becomes easy, right? Exactly. or you said that I think it was Stephen Covey, but wow. Yeah. In service of the mission, I'm here to try to help small and medium businesses sell to larger companies.
00:22:29
Speaker
Okay, I have to speak. I'll figure that one out. I tend to think of myself as a decent speaker, but I don't do it nearly as much as you or even Dave does. I think i that idea of speaking in front of a thousand people or is so daunting to a lot, but eventually you just settle into it and you do own it.
00:22:50
Speaker
I think the last time I did a speech, I had a car accident an hour ahead of time. And so I thought I'll use that. And so I started the speech by saying, hey, just, I want to be honest with you guys.
00:23:03
Speaker
I had a car accident about an hour ago. And so they said, if it's fine as long as you keep, as long as you don't keep repeating yourself. then you probably don't have a concussion. And then like 10 minutes in, I said, oh, by the way, I had a car accident about an hour ago. And i they said, if I start repeating myself, that should be a problem. So I thought it was funny, but man, there were half a dozen people who came up to me afterwards and okay, we're getting you an ambulance.
00:23:29
Speaker
one oh my God. For what? You sold it too hard. And I was like, why did, have I been repeating myself? I was in a car accident an hour ago. Okay. So like get getting back to the book, which by the way, is available on Amazon. If you just search for Jill Conrad, I think people tend to love the idea of a breakthrough, but it's often hard to actually break through because they hate the uncertainty of that. So so how do you help people get from that creamy, messy middle to really saying enough is enough and that it's time for another new urban adventure?
00:24:06
Speaker
Well, that's a good question. I don't know how you get people there. How did you get there? Well, I got bonked on the head. I... You got into a car accident, you decided and you started repeating yourself. Repeating myself, yes. Yeah. How do you get people there? I think people have to get there themselves or you can ask questions in terms of why do you keep putting yourself through this or are you happy?
00:24:29
Speaker
Are you happy with what you're doing? Does it excite you or do you dread it? and And if you dread it, maybe you should think of something else. You can't make anybody do that, but you can open a pathway for them to start thinking differently about it.
00:24:42
Speaker
So then let's dig into that. Cause I think happy, satisfying enough. Those are the most enigmatic words in the English language because they mean something different. So how do you define what those words mean to you now versus 10 years 20 years ago? twenty years ago I think it as you age and your family grows, you have a whole different perspective. My kids are grown up and on their own. And there was a time years ago when they were little and I was taking them to daycare. So your life changes. So I don't know how to answer your question except to say that things change and you just need to be open to it.
00:25:20
Speaker
It creates opportunities to me. I did daycare, drop off every day. It was the worst 10 minutes of my life every day. Yeah, not fun. It's challenging. And then I got better. yeah i' just the So I know the book has some real life stories in it.
00:25:36
Speaker
And so what are some of the, what's one of the stories that has stayed with you even after writing? What's one of the stories that what? That stayed with you. That stayed with me.
00:25:48
Speaker
I met this woman and she is from Cameroon. And I asked her to share her story. And she she loved playing basketball. She was tall. she Right now, she's probably six feet, five inches tall. She's a tall, athletic woman.
00:26:05
Speaker
But when she was younger, she needed to have... Her chief in Cameroon approved of her going that route and playing basketball.
00:26:17
Speaker
The chief was her uncle, and she'd already had some health problems. And the chief came and watched her and told her to drop it. And she literally said to herself at that age, no.
00:26:30
Speaker
I love basketball. I'm going to keep doing it. And so she kept on doing it. She ended up playing on a Cameroon international team in competition.
00:26:43
Speaker
She came to the United States and went to college in New York, upstate New York. She led her team to the finals of the NCAA or whatever. It was a second tier, not the main tier.
00:26:57
Speaker
and The NIT. Is that what it is? Yeah. Okay. She led her team to the finals and now she is has a master's degree in health stuff, health management, that that type of thing with numbers. I don't know.
00:27:13
Speaker
But she made this decision as a young girl that, no, I'm going to go for it. And that was a pivotal moment that changed her life entirely.
00:27:25
Speaker
I love that. think most of us, that would have been something that was a showstopper. Certainly that kind of culture or system where it was much more set in stone what your future is going to be. Yeah, you need the chief's approval.
00:27:41
Speaker
Yeah. So that's incredible. How would you counsel someone who has... maybe an authoritarian or an an authority in their life that maybe is operating in their best interest, not necessarily that person's interest. yeah How do you counsel them to get around that?
00:28:00
Speaker
You're asking me a question I'm not prepared to answer. I don't know. I really don't. There's so many, like with Angela's story, there's so many different factors involved.
00:28:12
Speaker
But she found her own footing and um how to do it. And I just think You have to let people find their own reasons and they have to feel strongly about what they want to do and that they want to make the
Pivotal Moments as Growth Opportunities
00:28:25
Speaker
change. And there are people that don't make the change and they live within the constraints of their relationships, of their countries, of their whatever it is. They live there.
00:28:35
Speaker
But there are people who want to do something. And I think those are the ones that you can work with. But I'm not a counselor. I'm a sales guy. Okay. Yeah. remember When somebody's finished with the book and close closes the cover, what's the feeling you want them to leave with?
00:28:51
Speaker
I want them to feel inspired to do what they're here to do in this life, to be working in an area that that is fun and to have relationships that are strong. But it's to me that my job is really to inspire people to and give them some skills to go through that those kind of changes. Yeah.
00:29:12
Speaker
So that they have some how-tos. Even so that they see things differently, I think. is I'm trying to reframe these pivotal moments as not the worst thing that could happen to you, but maybe the start of the next best thing that could happen to you.
00:29:26
Speaker
and The book has 29 stories, besides a bunch of mine, of different people with all sorts of different pivotal moments and you know how it made their life better.
00:29:38
Speaker
I know I've been a big fan for a long time. This is an honor for me to be able to have you on. And I can't wait to get my copy of the book, which is that again, available on Amazon as we speak. It is. Dave, any final thoughts?
00:29:51
Speaker
I think it's super important and we are in a weird place in our society and we're coming to terms with a lot of different ways that the media seems to be overbearing and and having an undue influence. And so yeah I think as we look at what people are using to hold them back.
00:30:16
Speaker
There's algorithms and yeah all kinds of stuff that's working silently in the back. having the insight and foresight to really look for what matters most to you and the fortitude to drive forward no matter what is incredibly important. And I think it's a diminishing skill.
00:30:38
Speaker
Thank you for writing this book. And I, like Trigby, I can't wait to read it myself. Thank you. it's It's a book that was meant to come out of me, and I'm glad to be able to share it with the world.
00:30:50
Speaker
I also want to say a few things, if I could, because you asked me about advice for entrepreneurs and such. And i can I share one more story? Absolutely.
00:31:02
Speaker
When I was teaching and trying to escape teaching to find a different job, nobody would hire me. And it was because of that age, women were only teachers, nurses. I didn't like blood.
00:31:16
Speaker
Secretaries, I don't take orders very well. And social workers, and I'm not nice enough. That's true. I was a teacher, but like I said, it was awful. And I was trying to escape teaching.
00:31:29
Speaker
And like I said, nobody would hire me. And ah an old friend told his father that Jill was looking for a job. And he was the VP of a large bank in Minneapolis.
00:31:41
Speaker
And he said, oh, have Jill call me and come in for an interview. She's got a great smile. She'd make a wonderful bank teller. Ooh.
00:31:53
Speaker
And I'm going, wait a minute, I got a brain when you're hiring these 21-year-old boys out of college with a business degree, and I've been teaching for four years, and I know how to run a classroom and plan things and do all this and that, and you want me to come in and smile? And it was like, that was a trigger event that sent me in a whole different path.
00:32:13
Speaker
And I said, okay, nobody will hire me. I will start my own company. And so I spent months at the library on Saturdays researching business. I didn't even know anything about business. And I suddenly came up with an idea and literally two statistics hit me. Number one, for the first time ever, companies were having trouble relocating their executives.
00:32:36
Speaker
reason why? Their wives were now working and had jobs that they liked, and so they didn't want to uproot the whole family and have the wife come and have fun. Anyway, second statistic I ran into was that Minneapolis-St. Paul had the fifth or sixth largest number of corporate headquarters in the nation.
00:32:54
Speaker
And I went, oh my God, I could help people. move in, not as a realtor, but as somebody who is a relocation consultant and and help families move in quicker, get jobs faster, find the right oboe lesson teacher or where their horseback riding was and move them in. And I put together a business plan. I studied how to do a business plan, put together, roped in a couple of friends, and we went down to SCORE, Service Corps of Retired Executives. Sure.
00:33:23
Speaker
Had a wonderful guy. He looks at the business plan, Oh, this is, he was from yeah General Mills, VP, marketing. And he looks us, this is really a good plan. It's a great idea. It's really needed right now. And he said, I think you three are going to be able to pull it off.
00:33:39
Speaker
And then he looked at us and he said, now, which one of you three is going to be doing the sales? And I leaned in and I said, I thought you said it was a good idea. Right.
00:33:52
Speaker
He said, it is Jill, but somebody needs to sell it. That's why I ended up going into sales. Not because I wanted to sell. I thought sales was disgusting. me And I had this great idea for a company, but you know what? Somebody had to sell it.
Sales Skills for Entrepreneurs
00:34:10
Speaker
In service of my idea, I wanted to do it. I needed to learn how to sell. And I know you work with the growing companies and that. And I just think,
00:34:20
Speaker
If they have the typical perspective of what selling is, they're disgusted by it. And I don't, I hate it. But if they want to grow their company, they need to embrace sales. They need to figure out how to do it from a professional perspective.
00:34:36
Speaker
And then they need to... see how to help their employees. You can't just hire a salesperson and throw them out there into the wild to sink or swim. You really need to teach who are our customers, what really matters to them, what issues and challenges are they facing. How can you have a good conversation with this person? and You need to get them out there to meet your customers just so they can hear from the real people what's going on. And all that stuff is crucial to growing your business.
00:35:06
Speaker
And a lot of entrepreneurs they hate it. But it's like I told you, I hated i hated speaking. I had to learn it in order to do something else. And I just would like to say if anybody's out there thinking that they can grow their business and do it, that that's it's just so important to to look at it that way. And the other thing I just think right now, and the question that you had asked me earlier, not on the sheet you gave me, a big question.
00:35:35
Speaker
important advice. And the one other thing that I would say is the big thing I see happening right now is people doing more. We need to make more emails. We need to make more this, more fat because the rates are down for so many different things. So clearly we have to do more. And the answer is you don't have to do more. You have to do better.
00:35:55
Speaker
And better is a whole lot different from more. And you have to take a look at what you're doing and you have to take a look at your own, if you're an entrepreneur, your own sales calls, your own meetings with people, and you have to say, oh, I pretty much sucked at that meeting. Or rather than saying he's so stupid, he just doesn't get why he should work with us. We should be saying, what could I do differently to have achieved a different conversation?
00:36:19
Speaker
And so much of it depends on you taking ownership of improving how you go how you do it as opposed to saying, I hate sales. No. Look at how you can make it better if you've got a sales team. They should be constantly experimenting and trying different things to see what works better.
00:36:36
Speaker
So to me, better, not more is crucial.
Episode Wrap-Up and Resources
00:36:41
Speaker
We normally end these podcasts by giving people the opportunity for naked self-promotion, but I think we've... I don't want to go naked, okay? This is not okay with me.
00:36:51
Speaker
The book, Pivotal Monits, is available on Amazon. and If you want to read more about it, you can go to whatsreallypossible.com. And if you want to learn, hands down, one of the best resources on the internet about how to be a great seller and how to have heart and how not to lose your soul in it, go to jillconrath.com. Can I just add, jillconrath.com is my website that i I've had up for ages. and I'm not working and doing sales consulting, sales speaking anymore.
00:37:23
Speaker
That's not what I'm doing. So I just left all my resources up there for free to download. And I don't even capture anybody's name. so You won't even get hit on a mailing list all the time. It's just help yourself download. it There's e-books, there's videos, there's i cheat sheets. I got all that stuff. It's all there.
00:37:43
Speaker
i love it. Well, thank you, Jill, for coming. Thank you, Dave, for coming along as well. So this has been another episode of Dial It In. He's Dave. I'm Trigvy. We are produced by Nicole and Andy. And with apologies to the great Tony Kornheiser, we will also try to do better the next time.