Brian J. Brim, Ed.D., is our guest tomorrow at 9:30 AM, Central.
Brian is a Practice Consultant for Gallup. For more than 21 years, Brim has worked as a consultant and advisor to some of the world's leading organizations.
He's recently co-authored with Tony Rutigliano, an excellent book on selling: Strengths Based Selling. Whether you are a fan of the strengths-based movement or looking for sales training manual backed with research, profiles and examples, that support tips and actionable plans to grow your sales...you'll want to buy this book.
Brian, thank you for being on the show.
Thanks again for having me on the show.
Thanks for writing a great book. Your writing style was pleasant and engaging. You included great research as well as tips and steps to take.
Before we move into talking about the book, let's define strengths. You define it nicely in your book with an equation on page 9. What are the elements in that equation? What's the definition then of strengths?
The equation we use is:
Talent x investment = strengths.
When you think about those elements, I think it’s a big mistake in organizations. We don’t truly understand the hydraulics among those elements.
So, talent is really what we would look at as an individual’s raw materials. It’s the way we act most naturally; it’s our tendencies.
If you take those tendencies and add the right elements of experience and knowledge, things that I can acquire, skill, things like basic steps that I can access and practice and you multiply those times your talents that’s when you get strengths.
Strength is that positive and productive application of your talent.
Excellent. Very clear, very crisp.
That definition when, I read it in your book, seems so natural, so obvious. I read it, my brain relaxes, I sense a little:
Ahhhh. Truth. Finally.
I'm a huge fan of college basketball and March is my favorite month since I was 7 years old growing up in NC. In sports, strengths-based management is so obvious.
And yet, your book and the Gallup organization and the strengths-based movement is considered revolutionary. Why the obvious disconnect? How did it happen?
I’ve always likened it to turning a huge ship. It just takes time.
And for years and years, our cultures across the world have been focused on weakness fixing; the lowest common denominator and finding ways to lift that up to success.
We’ve created a lot of programs, a lot of management systems, a lot of training to really support that. And I think what’s occurred, even in our worldwide research, where people focus most of their time and we use examples of children’s grades.
“We ask them “What deserves the most attention: the A’s, the B’s, the C’s...the F’s.”
People always tend to gravitate towards that F.
So, it’s a big shift to help individuals begin to think differently. To begin to understand that yes, indeed, we have things that may get in the way of our success that might be barriers or weaknesses. But, the best way to attack those is to find out more about the best of who we are.
So, it’s a bit of a counter-intuitive element that has been difficult for people to adopt. But, slowly, more and more people are having the experience you said. When you felt that little sense of Ah...because every time I give speeches or talk with clients and we start down this road you get that sense of:
“Ah, that really makes sense. Finally someone is going down that road that let’s me be the best of who I am.”
Excellent.
Now, you’ve been consulting with businesses for 20 years and you’ve consulted in the sales arena for 20 years, why now? What compelled you to write this book now?
Tony Rutigliano, the co-author, and I have been good friends for 20 years. And we regularly engage in those nerdy, consulting, conversations about how to change the world. You addressed some of those at the beginning.
We started this book some years back. We’re having some tough times as a country and a world and he and I just continue to talk about the things that we’re passionate about and see things that are working. Tony had done some work on an earlier book that was different than this and was still around sales. But, it was written in a general way, a broader perspective of strengths and management from a sales perspective. What we really wanted to create was something that was very usable for not only managers but for salespersons, too. We had to bring to market this idea of combining talent with the right experiences to drive strengths and do so in a compelling way, at a tactical level, so that it became useful.
In our own little way perhaps we could have impact on sales organizations, we could drive more sales, and potentially we could have an impact on broader level as well.
My friend, Erika Andersen, coined a phrase and question in her book Being Strategic, I use in nearly all my interview. The phrase is reasonable aspiration or hoped-for future. And the question is:
What is your reasonable aspiration or hoped-for future?
What was yours with writing this book?
Love that question! I can see why you ask that question every time.
Our reasonable aspiration is that more and more salespeople existing long-term or new, more and more sales managers long-term and new, would pick this book up and read it. And experience that ‘ah’ that you did earlier.
I think that so many of those folks out there today really want to discover more about how they can be better. These are folks who really want to achieve; they really want to do well. And the people managing them, the best of them out there, are the same way.
Our reasonable aspiration for the future is that more and more of those people have just not been able to connect fully with who they are as a sales person and connect fully with their customers in a way that they know would change the game not only for them but for that customer. They’ll have that opportunity from reading the book, through applying the best of who they are, and tackling it in the real world.
That’s what we love about our work. We’re helping people get really real about who people are, who human beings are, how we think, how we operate and what we need to be successful.
I like the point you made about finding the best of who they are and connecting with their customers. I’m thinking, here in my little office, that if you apply the best of who you really are and then connect with others...then there’s a good chance you could bring out the best of who they are. We could start a whole movement, a worldwide movement, to bring out the best in people.
Who is the reader you had in mind as you labored in the early mornings and late at night? What do they look? What's their background? What positions do they hold?
You know what’s great about this book is what’s really interesting is that as we’ve gone to market, I’ve had folks from different organizations say to me:
“I’ve handed this to people in our service department.”
Those weren’t even people we were thinking about. In our late nights, those people in the front-line sales who were trying to raise the game, who were new to the game, the folks that managed them and even the sales executive, the ones who carried a bag for many years and now who lead a big part of a sales organization and who want to take that to a new level. To us, those were the real obvious ones.
Then we started realizing it was book for CEOs, for folks who were at the head of organizations who really understand that sales is really at the heart and soul of our organization.
Then we had our own epiphanies that we realized there was some great information in here about:
“If I’m in a service role, and I’m supporting a sales role, then this is a great book for me to read as well."
It does give you insights about building stronger engagement internally with my internal constituents and external with my customers. Building a stronger and more integrated life....
So, there’s a bigger audience out there than we even realized when we started this journey.
You’re providing such great answers it easily leads us to the next question.
What's in it for them? Why should they care about Strengths-Based Selling, the book and the reality?
I think what’s really wonderful about it is ...I’m fortunate in that I’ve had the opportunity to work through this filter of strengths for so many years. I think what it creates first and foremost is a sense of acceptance people have about themselves. We realize that the reality of the world is that we’re kinda messy as human beings. We got some rough edges. And we live in this world where we’re supposed to be all things to all people.
I think what the strengths-based approach does is it allows you to take a breath and say:
“Guess what? I’m a human being. I’ve got some rough edges. But there are some really good parts to who I am."
And if I can understand that and lean into that, then that’s really going to help me have stronger performance and stronger engagement. I’m going to see success in what I’m doing more. It’s going to help me connect with my customers. And when we think about how much time we spend with our customers, isn’t it a positive thing to be building positive versus negative relationships with them?"
We even have a chapter in there about work-life integration. And, how we need to look at our life as not this perfect balance but as an effort to integrate the core principles of our life together so we can feel well-being, etc.
I think it goes to a deeper level of who we are as human beings. It creates this sense of wholeness and well-being, of opportunity for excellence.
Our economy, as we talked about at the beginning, still reflects a lack of strong sales skills. Maybe we have an economy based on weakness-based selling.
What are the three most common errors you see companies making in their sales training? How does strengths-based selling correct those?
You know the most common error we see is that we think that there is one right way to s ell in our company. And so, what’s so fascinating about that is that even in an organization which has a strong sales culture and they’ve decided that there’s one right way to sell that they get so caught up in that that they forget that it’s individuals that bring the magic to the sales process.
That’s not to say that we should not give our sales people training and education. We are fully in favor of that. But, we should give our sales people training and education through the lens of who they are:
“I can give you some of the best training we’ve found to help you move forward to a successful sale. However, we want you to hold yourself up against that process. We want you to understand how to hold yourself up against that process and figure out a way for you to get there.”
The second thing we see in our sales organizations are we tend to promote people based on sales performance into sales management roles. We take out best sales people and we promote them to sales manage because they have the best sales record. Well, those two things don’t correlate all the time.
And so there are some sales people who can make that transition into effective sales manager. And there are others who should continue to sell. Managing other people is not in their talent mix and it’s not a good thing to do for them or for other people.
The third thing is a big thing we do is we don’t think about the relationship with our customers in a long-term, consultative, strategic, organic way. So, we tend to, like you said, get caught in these pricing wars, we get caught in commodity sales and we don’t do our due diligence in understanding the critical need to build strong and engaging relationships with our customers that sustain our business long-term.
Those would probably be the three biggest mistakes we see.
I’m smiling because those points are taking me back through memory-lane. Most recently, I was going back through my conversation with Chris Zane who’s had 23% annual growth since 1980’s. His big point is understanding the lifetime value of customers. They understand how to make back any WOW experience they give their customers.
Do you have an example of a company who introduced strengths-based selling? Or a company who has implemented them effectively?
We actually have a whole list of them. We interviewed 15 or 20 different organizations as part of the process for this book. We spoke to outstanding sales people from those sales organizations. There’s a whole list of organizations that have adopted the strengths-based sales approach.
In most cases these organizations are moving from a traditional approach that most organizations take to one that is much more strengths-based. Like I said, there’s a whole list of them. And it’s really been an interesting thing to do with organizations. It’s a whole new way of thinking.
What’s fascinating about when they start going down that path it really does take on a life of its own. And, if you take it seriously, and that’s big key that I’m always talking to my clients about, it’s hard work. You have to take it seriously. And if you do that , it really does have a pay-off.
And all the folks we interviewed in the book are proof of that.
What were their biggest obstacles to embracing these natural and obvious principles?
Wow. That’s a great question.
Some of the obstacles that we see, again, are that turning of the ship. We have for so long implemented systems in our organization that were so weakness-focused. We have been taught all of our lives that to ignore the A’s and focus on the F’s even though the A’s are really what you’re going to be great at in life.
It’s the same way in our organizations. And so, it’s really taking that time and holding steady to the course of shifting people’s perspectives. It has to go beyond some simple as we jokingly call them, spa days, when people discover something about their strengths. But then learn to apply that.
The biggest obstacle is really shifting a culture to point of understanding that:
- Yes, we’re still going to challenge our selves.
- Yes, we’re still going to hold ourselves accountable..
- Yes, we’re still going to overcome the barriers that lie before us
But, we’re going to take a different tactic to doing this. We’re going to look for ways to do that through the lens of our strengths. It’s changing things like:
- our performance management systems
- the way that you bring people on board
- the way that you position people in the organization
- the way you help people understand how to partner with their internal customers.
It’s all those things. It’s a broader sales force effectiveness strategy that organizations have to adopt to fully embrace and apply the principles in the book.
Is there a common catalyst or epiphany that they share that turns them towards strengths-based selling.
I think there’s a couple of big ones. You’ve touched on these in a different filter.
One big epiphany is that organizations are always saying:
“We want to get the best from our people.”
But, they don’t help people understand what’s best about them. That’s a huge one. they’ll say we want to get the best from our people, so we’re going to tell them how TO sell vs we’re going to understand the best of who they are and we’re going to tell them how to sell based on the best of who they are. How do YOU sell?
That’s a big one. It’s really this aha, that oh my gosh we really are different individuals and we do look at the world differently. So, that’s a big one.
The other one is really through the lens of the whole field of behavioral economics. And, the big aha is when organizations truly understand the huge amount of play that the emotional economy has in the work we do as organizations. We tend to manage our organizations through a lens of rationality. When, indeed a huge among of managing our organizations comes through an emotional filter.
And, so, that second big aha is we have to as organizations learn to embrace that emotional economy and truly connect with our customers in a different way. And the best way to do that is to help our individuals connect to their strengths.
Excellent answer. Again, thank you!
I mentioned a startling statistic in my introduction. Return on Assets have dropped by over 75% for publicly traded companies since 1965. Clearly...the majority of companies do not embrace these principles. But more are beginning to take those steps.
Let's say a sales manager is listening and they probably are. And they want to transition to a strengths-based management, training, shop. The first step to do that is to buy your book and read it, right? What are the next three?
The next three would be to understand what you’re aiming it at.
The reason I say that first is so often people get excited about concepts like this. But they don’t have legs because there’s not this body of research, this depth of principles and practices at the heart of them. So, they lay flat on the page as I always say.
So, you have to understand the real purpose of this. What do you want to aim this at, this big change you want to see in your organization. You have to have some passion, some energy behind why it is you that you’re doing this.
Now, in the sales game, that’s a pretty easy target to set. That’s really about building a sustainable customer relationships. So, I’ve got to start with that real purpose, that real passion, in mind so I can help my sales people get behind this, get excited about this.
So, I have to know what I’m aiming at.
Then I have to invest the time and resources in really doing it right. I have to understand tat importance of this. It’s going to take time and money. It’s going to take hard-work. If you do this just half-way then it’s going to dither away like a lot of the flavor of the month things.
The thing is what we know is that if you do this right it has potential to have a substantial impact.
Then the third thing is you have to integrate it and you have to get leadership behind it You have to make sure the leadership sees the value of it, they understand the need for doing this. But they also understand the need to fully integrate it into the culture so that it becomes something real and it becomes a way that we do business.
The way that get that number three, get senior management behind it, is they show the tangible results from the stronger customer relationships and growing sales on a sustainable basis.
Absolutely.
Could a frontline sales person use this book to spearhead a change in their organization?
You bet!
It’s so interesting you say that. We’ve seen it happen in organizations in a couple of ways. One way is that you get a great CEO who says:
“I get behavioral economics; I get that we need to change the way that we play this game or we’re just not going to win."
then you also have some of those real smart folks who are out in the field doing battle every day. Frontline. They really get it in the gut. I tell you, I’ve done a lot of speeches around this work and I’ve done a lot of consulting around it and these sales folks get it right away. They’re like:
“Yes! That’s so true. I do things differently from the guy next to me and yet we’re both in the Top 5 % of sales.”
That kind of proves it right there. And you get those folks out on the frontline and what I’ve seen is they really get excited about it. They kinda start those brush fires. And they get excited about it and then what they do is they tell their manager. And the next thing their manager is talking about it with all their people and buying books for everyone. Then the next thing you know that sales manager is talking to his regional manager or the next one up the line. And so, you start to get that ground-up effect of people saying:
“What’s going on around here?”
And, as you mentioned earlier, that’s when they start to see results. And from there, that’s when you start to see a grass-roots effort where you can start to see some real change start to happen.
How does one discover their strengths? Tell us about the strengths-based finder. What's its role in strengths-based selling?
The Clifton Strengths Finder is an assessment tool we use as part of this book. This was something that was spearheaded by someone named Dr. Don Clifton. I was fortunate enough to have Don as a mentor for many years at Gallop before he passed. The Strengths-finder is heavily researched assessment. We put a lot of time and money into creating it. We wanted to create something that was serious. We wanted to give people a granular picture of who they are.
There a lot of things out there that give you assessments. I’ve done a lot of them. I’ve enjoyed all of them. Frankly, I’m just that kind of person.
But what I like about this is when I have people tell me about this who have done a whole lot of assessments is that this level of granularity you get to is where the real rubber hits the road.
The Strengths-Finder is part of this book. You get an ID to go on-line and do the assessment. It takes about 20-30 minutes. It’s a series of 4 choice comparisons. It’s really top-of-mind. You’re going from your gut.
And, what it does is it produces a Top- 5 Theme Report or a Signature Theme Report that tells you your top 5 themes. What that is is that’s really telling you your strongest areas of potential. You get a real strong perspective of who you are as a person and what your strongest lever points are.
And it helps you then as you go through the book and you continue to learn about the different steps of the sale process. We’ve created our own standard sales process as a backdrop to the book. You’re able to hold yourself up to each one of those sales process elements to help you better understand what it is you need to do in order to be more successful in that particular area if it’s important to you.
That’s kind of what it’s about.
It gets to such a level of granularity that the likelihood that you would have the same Top 5 as another person in the same order is about 1 in 33 million. It’s an amazing level of granularity that it is taking you to so you can understand who you are as an individual.
Chapter 3 is about prospecting. Those in the sales field may have a dark grin on hearing this term. Prospecting is another name for cold-calling. What are the three key points in your book on this?
That’s a great one!
I’ve had so many talks with people about cold-calling. We talk pretty openly about that in the book. Here’s the thing about that. What’s great about the strengths-based approach is it really starts by saying:
“Who am I?”
And then it’s about breaking down the elements of the sales process that you have to deal with. And then understanding who you are against the backdrop of that sales process.
So, cold-calling is the same type of thing. If I’m an individual involved in prospecting and I know I’ve got a morning of pounding the phone and pulling up the numbers and I’m dialing for dollars as you well know. The whole thing is saying:
Who am I as a person in relation to this challenge?
So, for example, if I’m an individual who has High Achiever; that’s a theme that we measure in the Strengths-Finder. And a High Achiever is about being able to feel like I’m accomplishing something. High-achievers like to check things off a list. So, if I’m a high-achiever what I should be doing is looking at this as saying
“I’m going to accomplish this many dials in this amount of time.”
And really get charged up about my accomplishment.
If I have a Learner theme, then:
“ I should make it about once I get someone on the phone who will talk to me I’m going to be able learn this, that, and the other about this individual that will help me understand.”
I had one individual who said he was highly independent salesperson. And he had people who were in his region, they weren’t competing against each other because they were in the same company, but what he did was he discovered which of these others in his region were highly competitive like him. And they got a pool going so that they could compete against each other to see who got through most of their calls. So, they really kept score in that way.
It’s really saying we all need to potentially prospect at some point in the sales game. How is it we’re going to do it the best? And how are we going to overcome that?
Now, if you shift it away from cold-calling then you can get into some of the other elements of prospecting and really look at those different elements, whether it be gatekeepers, etc.
One of the biggest obstacles to sales is getting past the gate-keeper. That's usually the receptionist, administrative or executive assistant. You have a nice, brief, profile and some good reminders about how to use strengths-based skills to address this challenge. I think everyone on this show faces that challenge whether we’re in sales or service or the IT department. So, how do we do that?
You know I find that to be one of the most interesting topics. I think that so often we think of Gatekeepers as someone who if we just schmooze them, we’ll win the game.
I think Gatekeepers are highly intelligent people who really want to see their organization succeed and I think we need to treat ‘em that way.
When I think about the best sales reps that I’ve had the chance to work with, they of course are incredibly kind to the gatekeepers. But you know what? They’re kind to everybody. They’re smart about building advocacy.
And so, with Gatekeepers the way that I see them build the best relationships is they make them partners. They look for advice. They give advice. They honor these people. They know they understand a lot more about the business than ...What I see in that particular case is they go beyond that surface level, “bring-‘em-donuts” kind of perspective...I’m not saying Gatekeepers don’t like that kind of thing. But it’s taking it beyond that to say:
“I want to help your business improve.”
So, I guess to summarize the point, it’s about being truly genuine. And Gatekeepers can sense that. They can smell disingenuous people a mile away.
And so you’re saying:
“I’m coming in here in a very genuine way. I’ve got solutions to help improve your business.”
And helping that Gatekeeper understand what those are. I think that’s what builds a fabulous partnership.
Great, great answer. Great perspective.
I'd like to go through and have you discuss in detail all of your chapters. They are so good. You probably just looked at your watch when I said that.
Chapter 6 you talk about turning acquaintances into advocates. What's that about? How do strengths come into play in that step?
I’ll talk about this through the lens of our internal customers. I think that’s one of the biggest issues in sales organizations today. It’s the rub between sales and operations. The reason there’s that rub is that we have dichotomous goals. We, in the operations, are trying to squeeze out everything we can to create better margins. On the sales side, we’re trying to make customers happy.
But, the other part of that is the best sales people I’ve interviewed or worked with are ones that realize that their internal operations folks are absolutely critical partners to them. They’re not just people put there to serve me in my sales function; they’re my best partner.
And so, first of all, it’s changing your perspective about that. And realizing that:
“Yes, I’m a salesperson. I’m out here with the customers. But I’m not going to be able to do anything for my external customers if I don’t fully partner with my internal customers.”
I think it goes both ways. I think the operations people do the same thing. The worst are the ones that think that sales is out there just to make my life miserable. And the best operations people are the ones who see that without sales we couldn’t keep the lights on just like we couldn’t without operations.
I think a big part of that first of all is shifting our perspective about what partnerships mean and how critical it is.
Then, what’s great about the strengths-based approach is when you bring those folks together and you look at them through the lens of strengths. I’ve sat around table after table after table where I’ve brought sales and ops people together and you’ve seen people across the table who have worked together for years. And, now you have them looking at each other through the lens of strengths.
What’s fascinating is when them say:
“Oh my god. You don’t act that way just to drive me crazy. You act that way because that’s who you are.”
And if we start to understand our differences we can also understand how great a partner we can become.
That’s when they begin to understand and value one another. Then they begin to understand the interesting connection between who they are as a strengths perspective.
They start to realize that customer engagement is our common goal. And then they start to realize that
" Wow. You’re in sales because you’re wired this way. And here’s some elements of your strengths that are so interesting and so different than mine. And here are mine. And yet here’s this common element. "
It really becomes an inspiring conversation.
That’s very inspiring. I’m going to have to go read through that book again.
Employee engagement is a favorite topic of mine, has been well since I started working a few decades ago. Sales people, and you touched on it a bit here, but sales people have this reputation of being almost rogue agents, pursuing their own goals and bonuses on their own at odds with everyone else. Why did you include a chapter on it, in this a sales training book?
I think it’s absolutely critical.
I think this gets to more of what’s at the core of sustainability for a successful sales person. I think that engagement, you know we’ve studied this more than any organization in the world, and it really becomes critical for employees and salespeople. And you kinda nailed it here when you talked about oftentimes salespersons are in a unique spot.
“I am in a unique spot oftentimes where I sit in an independent spot, depending on my role, where I can end up being a field agent where I don’t have the same type of structured hours or structured connection.
But that doesn’t make my level of as a sales person any less important than a person sitting in an operations position.“
And what we really try to help salespeople understand is that because of your position there are probably ways you should be thinking about how you are engaging yourself differently than those people who have more of a structure around them.
And, so, it talks about:
“How can I as a salesperson take some more ownership for my own engagement so I can have a long-term sustained career. So, that I’m not burning out from not paying attention to those core foundations of engagement.”
So it does talk about how to be stronger in your approach to engagement by having conversations with your manager. Stronger in your approach by having conversations with your manager, understanding the elements of engagement and how you can manage those things.
So, these are the things that are really critical. And it does come back to:
“How do I create a long-term sustainable career in sales and avoid that burn-out factor if I am in one of those roles where I am highly autonomous.”
Each of your chapters talks about a key element in the sales process...from prospecting to customer engagement and then to employee engagement.
Big question here. Which one is most important or which one is the one holding sales back right now in our economy?
The answer would be...Absolutely.
It’s all of the above. It’s a combination.
That’s the biggest issue is that we haven’t understood the connection between all those things.
You mention you’re big fan of basketball. In our organizations we tend to get really focused on one element. I might be really good at dribbling but I never figure out how to pass the ball to the right person.
I think it’s the same thing here. I think our organizations get very disintegrated here. We have one part of our organizations paying attention to customer engagement. We have another part of our organization paying attention to employee engagement. We have another part of our organization paying attention to sales training.
And none of ‘em are connected. And it’s crazy. So, when we finally get time to sit down and think about that we tend to ask:
“Why did it take us so long to figure THAT out?
Because unless we truly understand how engaged my employees are and how engaged my customers are because then we can get people the right type of support and education to drive towards those factors of engagement then we’re never getting all of those things aligned and integrated.
So, those things all have to come into alignment for us to be successful.
We've reached the imagination moment in our show. Let's imagine President Obama has been listening. And he's calling you right after the show. "Brian", he says on your answering machine. "Look , my picks in March Madness are going well. But I can't seem to pick a solution to grow sales in our economy. How 'bout you and your co-author come up here to the White House. Let's have coffee with Joe and talk about a way to implement strengths-based selling on a national level."
What are three things you guys would tell him?
You know that plays right back into what we were just chatting about.
I would start by telling him we need to re-frame the way we look at our customers. That’s the very first thing.
“We have to understand the emotional elements of a customer relationship. Until we as sales organizations get that right, we can build all sorts of systems within our organization then that disconnect is always going to leave us behind from a competitive perspective. “
I would always start there.
Then I would step back and I would say:
“Then we have to understand how the critical levels of employee engagement are critical to understanding the levels that we can drive to that customer engagement.”
So, I would talk a lot about that relationship, that meaningful, emotional-economy base relationship between employees and customers.
I would take one step back and talk about the critical need to understand who they are at their core from a strengths-based approach in order to drive all of that energy in the right direction.
Helping people understand their strengths, help them get more engaged, to help them build a stronger, more engaged relationship with that customer is really what’s ultimately going to drive our economy as a whole and the economy of the world.
Social media. Does that play a role in strengths-based selling? Is there one tool that's better suited or is it dependent on their strengths and talents?
I think it’s a great tool. We have in our book a list of 7 strategies for sharpening strengths and managing weakness. And social media plays into one of those strategies.
Let’s say I’m an individual who’s not extroverted and I’m in a selling capacity in my network and yet I have Learner as one of my themes. I’m interested in discovering more about those around me. My first inclination with social media is:
“I’m not going to get involved in that type of thing. I don’t like to put myself out there.”
Well, strengths can help me reframe that. If I’m a learner, I realize it’s not just about putting myself out there it’s about gaining access to information. And I love that as a Learner.
Social media like any other type of support system is something I need to look at and think about how will that help me drive to that critical outcome. So, I always start there. Is this something I could use to drive towards that critical outcome and then how is it best suited to who I am as a person through my lens of strengths.
It’s just one of those support systems I can think about through the lens of strengths and then just make some good decisions about whether or not it serves my overall purpose"
Leaders are readers. Jim Rohn says that. I just like it and use it here on this show. You're a leader, have been for over 20 years. What are you reading for fun or work?
I’m definitely a reader. That’s for sure.
I’ve picked up, I was reading a book around leading change. I’m always reading a book about leading change.
You won’t believe the book I’m reading...it’s one that we wrote called Human Sigma. It really talks a lot about what we’ve been chatting about with behavioral economics.
Leave us with one last thought on why strengths-based selling can help a sales person and their company reach their goals faster?
Strengths-based selling is about accelerating the best of who you are.
I think we often forget to look at the core of people. We tend to want to have some magic levers we can pull to make everybody the same. The bottom-line is we are all different. And our strengths are what make us different.
I say this a lot. You have to trust your talent. You spend some time understanding your talent. Invest in it. And that drives to positive productive growth.
I'll add 3 reasons to buy your book:
1. it's well-written
2. it's supported with research data and examples
3. it includes actionable steps you can take right now, immediately after the show.
Thanks, Brian!
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