In this episode, we explore the power of focusing on process over goals when training high achievers. Through the story of Jay, a highly motivated individual with no prior sales experience, we learn how a well-designed deliberate practice regimen can transform a "blank slate" into a top performer. By prioritizing the mastery of skills and processes, rather than just setting lofty targets, we can unlock the potential of driven individuals and cultivate long-term success in any industry.

Welcome back.

It's connect and convert your sales accelerator podcast, where

you get insider secrets to growing your sales faster than ever.

I'm your host, Dennis Collins.

I am joined today by the lovely and talented.

Hello,

Leah Bumfrey out of Canada, where we still have snow.

You still have snow.

As we record this, I'm in Florida and we have no snow.

I don't understand.

How could that be?

Hey, Liam, today I thought we would talk about something

that's very personal to me.

Goal focused or process focused?

Inside the mind of a high achiever.

That sounds pretty lofty.

I don't know if I hope we can deliver to our viewers and listeners on that.

That's a lofty topic, but I want to start, uh, by telling a story.

I want to introduce you to Jay.

I knew this kid as he was growing up, but my clearest memory of him

was when he graduated college.

Now, this kid was an achiever in everything he did.

I saw that.

Because I was a tennis player at the time, and this kid didn't even start

tennis until he was in his teens.

And he ended up becoming a high level competitive tennis player.

Very coachable, very smart, highly motivated.

In college he was a criminal justice major, but he lost interest in law

enforcement and he needed a job.

So, I met with him, we had lunch, we talked, I had an idea.

I had a plan.

There was something in my belief system that I'd always wanted

to try, but the right situation was rarely, if ever, available.

And I said to myself, this could be the perfect opportunity.

I'd always wanted to take someone new, someone fresh, someone without bad habits

and preconceived ideas, basically a blank slate, and prove a long held belief.

So, what do you think I called it?

I call it the blank slate challenge.

Isn't that creative?

I like that.

Okay.

Well, let me tell you, maybe you will.

Maybe you won't.

I want your opinion on this.

I've had this long held belief.

Again, as I said, if I could find someone who's qualified with the right

attitude, and as I said, the fresh new, no prior experience, no bad habits,

no preconceived ideas, and give them a specific non traditional training

regimen, they would have a better chance of becoming a master high performer

than others who don't have that.

So, when we focus on people who win, here's, here's the

traditional thing that we think.

They won because they had lofty, ambitious goals.

That's what got them to the win.

But I will say this, my theory is behind every high achiever, you will

find a process, a system for success.

So do you mind if I share my theory, Leah?

Are you ready for this?

I'm, I'm very curious.

Cause what you're saying is, okay, this is a guy who didn't have,

cause we're talking sales, so he had no previous sales experience.

He didn't have that mindset of, okay, I want to be doing this.

He knew that he was ambitious in the general sense, but you were

going to take him and see what you could do with this blank slate.

I'm very curious.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, big risk and you know, somewhat expensive, but let me tell

you how I arrived at this theory.

Bill Walsh, three times Super Bowl winner coach focus on the process.

The score will take care of itself.

Those words have echoed in my mind for decades.

Goals are good to set the direction.

We've got to have a direction.

But processes and systems are best for building skills and making progress.

If you, let's say you totally ignored goals.

No goals.

And focused only on perfecting your process, your system.

I want to know what would happen.

See, I don't think results are the problem.

I think it's the systems that produce the results that are the problem.

Okay.

Okay.

So.

You already guessed it.

I am talking about a salesperson.

Why was this risky?

Well, it defies conventional wisdom, wisdom.

You know, I grew up, as you know, in the radio business and managed all the

way through to general manager and, you know, three decades in that business.

So I, I, the conventional wisdom was, Oh, you got to hire

someone with radio experience.

You got to have somebody who knows the business.

Right.

Right.

Well, guess what?

I was going against traditional wisdom.

That's tough.

Uh, the traditional wisdom was read a few books, go to a couple seminars,

get out there and sell, focus on your outcomes, your targets, your goals.

And when you hit these targets, some nice things happen.

You make some money and you get to keep your job.

That was how I was hired.

I figured, you know, that was very traditional . Yep.

I know you've spent some time in the radio business.

Does that sound familiar?

Oh, yes.

Here's the yellow pages.

Go make some calls,

. Dennis: That's what I was told.

Hey, if it hadn't been, you know, I had a burning desire to learn more, as I'm sure

you do, and that's what is the difference.

I taught myself this stuff, but I wanted to try this.

Now, I don't want to negate the value of goals and targets.

In every human endeavor, I don't care what it is, they're important.

But there's something that I believe is more critical, and that is learning

and installing the process for success.

How do we get to success?

What actions do we have to take?

What do we have to do to get to success?

Continuous, monitored, daily, small.

process improvements, continuous every day monitored.

You got to have a coach, a sales manager, a buddy, an accountability

partner, somebody who's monitoring your, your progress.

So here's what we did.

My sales managers and I devised a very extensive, deliberate practice routine.

Jay was accustomed to this.

I knew his tennis coach, by the way.

Um, I don't know.

I, I had that same coach.

I never became an exceptional tennis player.

What the hell happened there?

Why did Jay?

Well, anyway, I did know the coach.

I knew he got a high rank in tennis, even though he was relatively late.

Uh, he was a high level college player and His coach believed in what we have heard.

You've heard us talk about deliberate practice, break down the process into

its component parts, deliberately practice, practice with a purpose, how to

effectively open a sale and master that.

Then we move on to questions.

How many different kinds of questions do we ask in a sales conversation?

Lots.

How about techniques?

How about, uh, disrupting a, a, uh, brush off or an objection?

Master that.

How do we do that?

Monitored, recorded role plays.

Not it's fine to practice by yourself, but they've got to be monitored.

They've got to be coached to be effective.

Deliberate practice requires coaching, instant coaching and feedback.

Do more of this.

Do less of that over and over and over until each segment of the

selling process is near perfect.

Okay.

Every segment of the sales conversation, how to open, what kind

of questions, how to listen, every anticipated brush off an objection.

So of course the objective or the goals informs the process.

It is not the process.

It guides the process.

Yes, we have to have results in business.

We don't just get rewarded for process.

The process though has to get to the result.

We, we, we do the process.

We check the result.

We make the necessary correction.

We're a little bit off here.

We're a little bit off there.

It's like firing an arrow at Archer, you know, okay, I'm bullseye, move

over just a tad, blah, blah, blah.

Repeat until the execution of the process produces the desired outcome.

So Dennis, I want to make sure I understand what you're saying.

Of course.

So you know, you would know, you would be communicating to Jay

where it is you want him to go.

But then you're giving him basically a template of activities this this

this and this with with monitored Feedback so that you're telling him.

Nope.

Not like that.

Do this.

Nope.

Not like that do this and Critically he's teachable He's in student mode.

He is not feeling.

Oh, quit telling me this.

Almost like that.

Well, exactly like his coach in tennis.

You, there would be a trust that, that he would have to have a trust that you're

doing this for the, for his benefit.

Yeah.

He would have to have, you know, again, this was a, a wonderfully motivated.

Person He would have to have a vision of his future success.

Okay.

Again If you have someone who doesn't care or is not motivated to become

better, this doesn't work okay, right this kid wanted to be better he proved

that to me in many ways as I knew him and watched him grow up otherwise You're

you're hitting on a you know, one of the weaknesses of this it wouldn't work.

It doesn't work for everybody Okay Bye.

Yeah.

If you have someone who wants it and you have someone who wants you

your success, it's a, it's a match.

Like so many relationships, right?

I can teach skills.

You can teach skills.

We can teach skills.

I haven't found a way yet to teach motivation.

Okay.

I can tell if someone has it or not, but I, I can, I can try to create

an environment that's motivating, but I can't motivate anybody.

Thank you.

That's, you know, hire for attitude, train and skills.

That was my motto, hire for attitude, for motivation.

This kid had the right attitude.

I had the sales managers and I had the knowledge about what skills were

needed for him to be successful.

Okay.

Does that make sense?

Okay.

It does.

And what I love about it is that this applies to any industry because the

people already in it know the skills.

And if you have someone motivated, you have that right person and hire

for the person because, uh, then you're not having to also, um, train

out bad habits, you know, don't do this, don't do this, don't do this.

That's really hard once they're embedded.

I, if I had a dollar for every one of those people that I hired in the radio

industry, Leah, we'd be doing this podcast from my yacht somewhere in the Caribbean.

Okay.

I mean, that, that is a killer.

That's what I got tired of.

And I wanted to try this and I tried this in other forms too, not

just with this brand new person.

And it's, it, it's, it does work.

It works best with this scenario.

But it worked in other scenarios that were similar to this.

Okay.

Traditionally, what happens when we put a new salesperson out there,

we give them some cursory training.

Here's your Riella pages.

See ya.

And by the way, if you don't hit this target in three months, you're fired.

What does that do to their psyche?

What does that do to their emotions?

Their, what does it do to their anxiety?

How is that a good way?

to onboard a salesperson.

I've never understood that.

Guilty.

Yeah, I had, I have done that at times.

I don't, I'm not proud of that, but I tried never to do that.

And this was an experiment that proved, and I'll tell you why.

So you might ask, well, what's become of Jay?

Well, he spent a very successful time as a salesperson, but not for long.

Uh, we parted ways many years ago, but.

He became a sales manager when he left our company and eventually became a major a

sales manager for a major pharmaceutical, uh, international pharmaceutical firm.

They then started his own business and sold it successfully.

He's now a partner in an exciting new startup, mostly because he

understands and masters process.

the process of persuasion, the process of communication, the process of influence.

As you said, Leah, these skills, this process works across many disciplines.

Wow.

What I am excited about hearing you, well, it gets me excited because

there are many people out there that are motivated for their own success.

They want to make a difference in business.

They might not have the, the foundation of a specific industry.

It's the finding of those people that can make the difference in any business.

And this is a template that anyone listening, any, any business manager,

any business owner can take, but also any sales professional can look at themselves

and go, okay, am I in student mode?

Am I willing to learn?

Am I looking at what I, the basic foundation of what I should be doing?

Because when you have those droughts where the success isn't happening,

when you're not achieving your goals, sometimes you have to look inward.

And this template, this process that you're talking about gives.

Both sides.

The opportunity to look at that.

Um, you were talking about communication and, you know, those basic skills.

And again, that always brings me back to Wizard Academy where they teach that

they teach that to people who are open.

And when you're open to learning, wow.

That's a great point.

Jay was open to learning.

Had he been closed off to learning, not only would this experiment

not have worked, but he wouldn't like the Wizard Academy, would he?

No, no, no.

You need to approach the Wizard Academy with an open mind, you know?

Because I guarantee you, one visit there and your mind will explode.

Wizardacademy.

org.

Our sponsor, we appreciate them and you will appreciate checking

them out at wizardacademy.

org.

So let's issue our breakout challenge.

We always try to end this with a challenge, right, Leah?

Yes, absolutely.

So, so how daring are you?

Do you have people in your organization who have that potential to be great, but

they just don't seem to be getting it?

If they have the attitude and the motivation and the desire,

it's probably about the training.

Are you willing to do your version of the blank slate challenge?

By the way, it can be done with the right person, the right regimen, the

right regimen of deliberate practice.

Jay is living example of that.

Are you bold enough to try it?

Okay.

This is about building people.

It's about building business and it's about building potential in industries.

It's very exciting.

It is.

But to me, that's the bedrock of my philosophy of human performance

that give me the blank slate that has the attitude and the motivation

to get better and we can find a way to train the process and the skills.

But the process and the skills determine the level of flight.

How high you go is not how high you set your goal.

It's how much skill you have and how much successful process you have.

I think fantastic.

I think we've covered this, Leo.

I love your questions.

Is there anything else that puzzles you about this or that you'd like

to ask on behalf of our listeners?

Well, I mean, if it hadn't worked when it, when it doesn't

work, I'm sure you have the other side of it when it doesn't, is

there a P what's what's missing?

What, what is missing when it's not working?

There are several things.

Number one, the raw material.

If, if you made a bad selection, in other words, this person does not

want to grow, they are not motivated.

They don't have the proper mentality.

And, and people can fake that.

I hate to say it, you know, job interviews are a joke, right?

I mean, you could, they could tell you anything.

I mean, you know, I never relied on interviews to, to hire a person.

I go deeper than that.

So you could have the wrong person.

Number two, it's time consuming to do deliberate practice to train that.

You gotta have the manpower, the person power.

To do that, you've got to, luckily I had, you know, about five sales

managers working with me that I could task, you know, myself

and them with each part of this.

So no one of us had to do it all.

So actually doing the, the deliberate practice is hard.

It's outside the comfort zone by definition.

If, if, if practice is comfortable for you, you are

not doing deliberate practice.

So, you know, it's too hard and we, it's just a time thing.

We just don't have it.

Or if If the deliberate practice is not designed properly to eventually

produce a desirable result, you know, I'm not saying throw goals away.

I'm saying put goals aside at first so we don't have that emotional attachment

to making the goal and have the emotional attachment to building your process.

Those are the three things that I think work and go wrong.

But today I wanted to talk about where it went right.

And, and you know what, for every time it goes wrong, that doesn't

mean, like, I mean, I love that you, you're, you've clarified it's the

person, it's the how, it's the why.

Those are all the reasons to make it work.

Because when you find, I mean, just think of any industry, when you find

the gem sitting in the warehouse, working on parts, and you can just

see that it's the right type of person that already understands your industry.

Wow.

If you can get them on the sales floor, they, they are so excited.

They are so motivated and they are so loyal.

It changes business.

Yeah.

They're just waiting for their chance for someone to believe in them.

So you know, your radar has to be on at all times because those

people are in your organization.

I guarantee it.

It's not just finding a guy like Jay who was outside and I brought him in.

They're inside your organization.

Put your radar on.

We'll do a podcast on that one day.

How's that?

I'm excited.

I'm excited to hear from our listeners and watchers when they do this and the people

that they find the gems that they find and yes, how it helps the organization.

Yeah.

Send in your comments and questions.

We'd be happy to put them on the, uh, on the air.

Okay.

Okay, let's close out another episode of Connect and Convert

the Sales Accelerator Podcast.

We'll be back next week.

Tune in.

Thanks for listening.