“Selling is not an art. It is a structured science. Now, when it’s done right, it looks artful, but it’s not like this free form, like taking a blank canvas and painting a new picture for each customer. We can’t afford that inefficiency today. We need to have structures and processes to make us both more efficient and more effective in getting it done.”
- Jim Pancero, Sales Speaker and Thought Leader
When you hear the word ‘system,’ several thoughts might start racing through your head. Visions of stuffy offices, dusty bureaucracies, and paperwork might crop up first. Or maybe, it’s a lofty idea, all talk and no substance.
Jim Pancero, a sales trainer of 40 years, leverages systems to transform his client’s businesses en masse. He employs a practical, understandable method to empower salespeople through dedicated practice and a careful understanding of people.
Listen in as Jim shares key insights on sales, salespeople, and sales management.
Topics discussed in this interview:
- Jim’s early interest in sales
- His time as a leading salesperson at IBM
- Transitioning to an independent sales training career
- What holds salespeople back?
- The four skills every salesperson needs to succeed
- The three positions that make up every company
- Placing people in the correct position
- Personality tests and salespeople
- Sales presentations and software
- COVID’s impact on sales at large
- The importance of practice
- Rapid fire questions
For more on Jim and his sales methodology, visit pancero.com, follow him on LinkedIn, watch his free videos on YouTube and Vimeo, and check out advancedsalesuniversity.com.
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This episode was produced by Isaiah Industries, Inc.
Intro/Outro:
:Welcome to the Construction Disruption podcast, where we uncover the future of design, building, and remodeling.
Todd Miller:
:I'm Todd Miller of Isaiah Industries. And today for this episode of Construction Disruption, my co-host is Ethan Young. How are you doing, Ethan?
Ethan Young:
:I'm doing pretty good today. How about you?
Todd Miller:
:I'm doing well. Also, we're here wrapping out a Friday afternoon, and I'm been looking forward to this guest all week. So we are going to dive right into it, if that's cool. So today's guest is Jim Pancero of Jim Pancero, Inc.. Based in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex, Jim has had a sales career dating back to the mid 70s when he started out with IBM, just a little company back then. But in 1981, he branched out on his own as a sales trainer, consultant and speaker at really a pretty young age to branch out into something like that. So Jim is well known for bringing sales teams of all types to a higher level, focusing on persuasion and motivation. Jim is also recognized by the National Speakers Association in their Speaker Hall of Fame. Jim, welcome to Construction Disruption. It's a privilege to have you on the show today.
Jim Pancero:
:Honored to be here and honored to be talking about construction. I tell people I'm really big in the HGD market, which stands for heavy, greasy or dirty.
Todd Miller:
:I like that. I may steal that, if that's okay. So so you as I mentioned, you know, you have been at this for a while, same as I have, I guess for a minute as the kids might say these days. I don't know what that means, but tell us a little bit about that career path. What led you into sales? How did you end up with IBM and what caused you, again, at a pretty young age to decide, Gee whiz, I can teach other people how to do this?
Jim Pancero:
:And I will make it very brief because the story sometimes gets complex. When I was in college my freshman year, I started, I got a sales job and I was selling part-time all through college. Senior year, I was full-time selling around my education and then in graduate school, when I went to get an MBA at the University of Cincinnati where I lived, I was working full time doing that. And all through college, even though I had success in selling, it was very clear to me I had no idea what I was doing. I was lost in the woods and just adrift, and I knew that there had to be a way to do it, but I couldn't figure out what it was. And then when I was in graduate school, first day of graduate school, in fact, I met a mentor who changed my life, a gentleman named Bill McGrane in Cincinnati, and he was a sales trainer and also did a lot of self esteem and persuasive work. And he showed me the restructuring, selling steps of a sales goal, more fundamental skills. But he showed me that selling was a science, it wasn't an art. And I was selling full-time while I was attending his evening classes, while I was also going to graduate school, kind of full blast and I would try the stuff he told us at night, the next day, and by noon I was seeing amazing results just on that whatever that latest new idea was. So I got excited about learning the structure of selling and just absorbed everything I could find. In the old days, I used to listen to audio cassettes. For your listeners, an audio cassette was a little plastic box that you put in to the machine. Anyway, and I was listening to 350 audio cassettes a year just consuming everything I could find on selling. All of the Dave Yoho, Don Beveridge, Don Hutson, all these just major, Tom Hopkins, all these years of their stuff and just learning the structures of selling. When I graduated from graduate school, I got a job with the IBM Corporation, their large computer division. This was the really big computers of the day. Raised-floor air conditioning could handle 6 to 8 online terminals. It was sold to large corporations, by the way, that $200,000 system had a half-MB of ram and a one GB hard drive. That should put life in perspective.
Ethan Young:
:Yeah.
Jim Pancero:
:But while I was with IBM, I had major success. I was, I got national recognition, made the Golden Circle, which is the top 5% of all their sales force, selling a new system that they had come out with. And it took two years of this major selling effort. And I did it, I was like tied for number one in the country within these models that I was selling across the entire U.S. And I went to my manager said, okay, what's next? I'm ready. Put me in coach. And he goes, No, we want you to do it again. And I thought, Well, this was boring as hell. So I started that. If it was, I wasn't willing to go through another several years of just this dogged work. It wasn't that much pay at the time, by the way. But still, because I was selling the small, the large computers, but within the smaller groupings of that, and I decided this is not where I want to be. I was not happy with the speed I was moving. I was dating a guest instructor at the IBM sales school that they had for all of their new hires because of my success. And I was outscoring all of the staff people that were presenting. So I decided I think this has the potential. So I went in, quit my job and said, I'm going to become a professional sales trainer and starved for several years. But then I knew what it was I had to tell customers and explain what I wanted to do, and they go, You mean like Zig Ziglar? I finally would say, Yeah, like Zig Ziglar, even though he was a great motivational speaker, I was trading on skills and structures in process. And so, yeah, I started my business when I was 30, 40 years ago, 41 years ago, and and decided that I wanted to do this. In fact, when I started, I actually was taking advantage of my IBM training in Miami and experiences and said, Look, I was one of the top salespeople at IBM. I can show your people how to do it. One of my first customers was the local ComputerLand distributor in Cincinnati saying that PCs had just come out two months earlier. I said, I can show you how to sell them. And so that just took off. And what I found was, so excited to be on your show or your program, I should say, apologies, not show. I'm so excited about it because what I found happened was the industries that resonated most with what I had to say and my style of presenting was we joke before, but it was heavy, greasy and dirty. I did 15 years of training John, Caterpillar dealers around the country. They used me for about 15 years. I trained about 4,000 John Deere dealer personnel on seven different programs I did for them over a number of years. A lot of work in the construction industry and base materials of how do you sell because it's such a competitive environment and there none of them were commodities? So even if somebody else thinks it's a commodity, how do you gain a competitive edge and how do you get a higher price when you're selling a commodity? And so my whole industry focus has been financial and insurance and real estate and those things. Everyone seems to be interested in me. But that wasn't my focus. My focus was on construction, on building materials, on distribution of base products, janitorial, sanitary supplies, plumbing supplies, all this stuff, exciting business.
Todd Miller:
:Very interesting. Well, so so this is off topic a little bit, but I need a story to go home and tell my wife. So, what was the IBM system you were selling at that time?
Jim Pancero:
:Well, my first three years were the last three years of something called the System 370s.
Todd Miller:
:Yeah. Okay.
Jim Pancero:
:And then my last three years were the first three years of a new product called a 4300. And they they were coming out with this brand new product, 4300, and the significant thing about it is it was the same processing speed as their smallest large computer software, but it was half the price. It was taking advantage of the new technologies. And so they decided that was going to open up new markets and they chose 120 salespeople around the U.S. to be prospectors on this new computer. For the first five months, I didn't even know what the computer was going to be, just that they were coming out with something that was cheaper at the same speed and was selling us. The average person in the country sold one or two. I sold nine, nine different ones to companies. So it was taking off with technology. It was right at the beginning.
Todd Miller:
:My wife was a programmer back in the 80s and she was with a company that went from a system 3 to a 36.
Jim Pancero:
:Yeah, that was the smaller division.
Todd Miller:
:Yeah, okay, okay.
Jim Pancero:
:You know, it was there were three divisions at the time at IBM, the office products, typewriters, copiers, that stuff, the small computer division, which was the system 3s up to the system 36s.
Todd Miller:
:Yeah.
Jim Pancero:
:And this is geek language, I apologize. Otherwise, we'll bring you to talk about the credibility coefficient of the inverse relationship in a trifectal system.
Todd Miller:
:Yeah, we don't want to do that, but the system 3 seemed pretty barbaric when she went to 36, I will say that, but. So let's get back.
Jim Pancero:
:They were all good systems.
Todd Miller:
:Let's get back on topic. So I want to ask you, I talk to a lot of business leaders and it always seems like a common thing that I hear from business owners when I ask them about their sales team performance goes something like this. They say, You know, Todd, I'm not real happy with my sales team's performance, but I don't know how to get them to do better. So I'm going to start with kind of a basic question. Do you think that most salespeople can do better? And if so, what is the most common thing that's holding them back from doing better?
Jim Pancero:
:Cheese.
Todd Miller:
:Cheese, we all need more cheese.
Jim Pancero:
:I'm sure we'll find out later, anyway. Now, well, it's fascinating. The answer is yes. It's interesting that of over the training that I've done, I would say probably two thirds of the people that have ever come through my training, either for salespeople or for sales managers, did not choose being in sales as a career.
Ethan Young:
:Hmm.
Jim Pancero:
:They came up through the warehouse or they or they were the technical expert of the product, and all of a sudden they needed somebody to be selling. And that person was the best one to choose. Or they came up managing as a general manager a lot of departments, and all of a sudden salespeople are reporting to them. Where they didn't choose, I'm going to be a sales manager when I grow up, it just kind of happened. So the reality of selling is this is why it's so important. Selling is not an art. It is a structured science. Now, when it's done right, it looks artful, but it's not like this free form, like taking a blank canvas and painting a new picture for each customer. We can't afford that inefficiency today. We need to have structures and processes to make us more both more efficient and more effective in getting it done. The problem you raise is that because this is the most common question or challenge or concern, I hear from people that call me, my customers calling in. If we're talking for the first time and they go, you know, we're not happy with the results that we're getting. We're not happy with how much they're selling or the margins that they're getting on what they're selling, or we're not happy that they're working their existing territory, but they're not doing any prospecting. They're not growing what they're doing. And there's really only one reason that's happening, and that's that's basically incompetent management because the person doing the job doesn't really know how to be a sales manager. I would say 95% of all the sales managers that ever have attended one of my programs never had any sales management training before that. They may have had some H.R. stuff, but that was it. So the idea of how do we take somebody and help them understand how to be better? They just didn't know. An example of this is because they either their background, they never knew how to do it or they were stumbling through the territory themselves, never knew any structures. It's like if i'm a golf pro and for holidays, your family gives you a free one-day golf lesson, so you come for your free lesson. Your lesson that was a gift from your family. And so I said, okay, we got one day together. What do you most want to improve in your game? And you say, Boy, I'd like to get an extra 20 yards out of my drive. How effective would my coaching be if my first suggestion is, why don't you try whacking it harder?
Ethan Young:
:Not gonna do much.
Jim Pancero:
:Yeah, it's not it's not just intuitive. It's, we gotta break down your swing and look at the structures, because if we improve the structures of your swing, you'll get the 20 yards plus a lot more. So this idea of the problem with managers is they're not even aware of the skills their salespeople need to be effective. This is an exercise I go through in my programs, do we have a moment to talk about it or?
Todd Miller:
:Oh, absolutely. Good stuff.
Jim Pancero:
:Or sales managers, as I'll say in my in my training programs, they'll say, okay, here's the scenario. You need to add two more salespeople to your company. If you're a salesperson, your managers come and say, okay, you're doing a good job. What skills do we need? Or if you're a sales manager, what skills do you want to look for in the people that you interview? Hmm. We'll build a list. And the problem is, the list is only half complete every single time. If we step back and look, what does it take to be successful in selling no matter what you're selling? There's really four levels of skills. The first level of skill is the one you see on the screen right now, your attitude and energy. You know, you all ask, what do you want in the next salesperson you hired? We want a hard worker, wouldn't be professional, curious, wouldn't be excited about the job. We wanted to work hard. All those are all attitudinally critical to selling, but that's the foundation. The second level up is your personal skills, your operational skills, your knowledge of the steps of a sales call, how to ask questions, how to close, how to qualify, how to probe. These are all personal selling skills. If we go back to the golf analogy, this is how you swing a club and hit the ball, not how you play the course. How in each individual sales call is this operational personal skill. This is also where your technical and product knowledge and industry expertise comes in because it makes you effective in front of a customer. The third level of selling skills is your tactical skills and tactics. Deal with process structures and controls. I want to give you an example of what I'm talking about. There are three major structures and selling tactics. The first is what do you do when you're going after new opportunities, whether it's a new opportunity within an existing customer or whether it's a whole brand new prospect customer you're going after. What are the steps of your process? What do you do from the time you identify a new opportunity till the time of closing the sale? What's your structure? Now the answer? Most salespeople have no idea. I joke at my program and say most salespeople are like the Hellari Bird. Ever hear the Hellari Bird?
Todd Miller:
:I have not heard of the Hellari Bird.
Jim Pancero:
:It's a three-foot bird, lives in four-foot grass, spent his whole life saying, Where the hell are we? It was on the Discovery Channel. So anyway.
Todd Miller:
:I just fell for that one..
Jim Pancero:
:I just hooked you right in. Anyway, that. So the only thinking will move ahead. This is, if we have a sales manager listening to this, this is a great test. You can go to your people, draw this visual out of this arrow. The idea of the arrow is one cycle of identify to close. The arrow just says the relationship is going to continue. But what's one cycle of that process? And it's drawn out. Hand it to a salesperson and say, You've been selling for us for five years. What are you doing? What are your steps? And I hear the salespeople say, It depends. Because they've never been taught structure. It depends, it depends on the customer. Depends on the situation. Depends, depends, depends. Does it bother anybody else that's also the name of a diaper, right? It's just with its process they only have the steps, they're not thinking. If you and I are playing chess and I only think one move ahead but you think two moves, How many games you going to win?
Ethan Young:
:Yeah.
Jim Pancero:
:It's gonna be all of them, isn't it? So now the question in selling is, how do we get you to think more moves ahead? But I would say over 90% of salespeople are thinking one move ahead. The second, go ahead.
Todd Miller:
:They entirely then let the prospect drive the process.
Jim Pancero:
:Yeah, and then that means it goes right to price.
Todd Miller:
:Right.
Jim Pancero:
:The second structure is okay with your existing customers, what's your plan from January 1st to December 31st to support and maintain and grow this account? What are your plans? And most salespeople have none. The average sales rep walks into the average customer and all they do, and they're calling on them monthly or they're calling them every couple of weeks if they're a distributor. But they only ask the same four questions every time they come in on a sales call. Anything you need, anything coming up, anything that can help with, how's the family? At this reactive we call it a three-step selling process of show up, suck up, and pucker up. I'll get all the jokes out of the way early so you can edit them out later. But this idea of they're just reactive and what they're doing, there's no proactivity in their plans. The third tactical structure is within larger customers. How do you get higher, wider and deeper? Because the average sales rep only has one contact at their important account. The contact is the owner or the person signing the check or the person that makes all the buying decisions. But they only got one. So if that person is fired, promoted, dies in a car wreck, they lose the account because it's back to ground zero. Those are tactics. The fourth and final is your strategic. And strategic deals with philosophy, your approach, your positioning. The toughest question in selling, I believe, is when a customer sits there and says, okay, look, you're the third vendor I've talked to this week, Why, based on all the competitive options available to me, do I want to buy from you? Now, you can't give a line card showing what you sell. You can't do a brochure on the product because that's not what the customer is asking. They wonder, what's your philosophy? What's your approach? What's your differentiation? It's a strategic, it's your messaging, it's your positioning, it's your branding. Now, here's the problem. Every program this happens. I asked the group whether it's salespeople help us suggest to what skills we want to look for in the next person that's going to be working with you as your peer or going to a manager saying, What are the attributes you want the next salesperson you hire? The list always only has the bottom two. I have a whole list of attributes of attitudes we want the people to have, and they'll be all the operational skills, will have good closing skills, know how to ask questions, how to qualify, knows our products, knows our industry. Now, those are all critical, but all they do is make you competitive. They don't give you a competitive advantage. Competitive advantage comes from the top two. But if you look, almost no training is done in the United States today on tactical, multiple-step thinking and planning and selling, as well as strategic positioning and communication of differentiation. All that you tend to hear is sell value, not price. So anyway, that's a how is that for a long answer to a short question?
Todd Miller:
:It's spot on. And I know one of the things that I see our sales manager do with our sales folks is, you know, every time they have an interaction with a prospect or a customer, he wants them to come back and say, What are your strategic next steps? What is the strategy that we're doing here? And you touched on it so well earlier, Jim, when you're talking about how so often salespeople have not been trained to sell, they just kind of ended up in this company. And eventually someone said, Gee whiz, you know our products well enough, you could sell this stuff. And so they end up being a salespeople and a salesperson. I think a lot of times the same things happens with the sales manager as well. It's the guy that for some reason, or the lady who has survived the longest and oh, now you're our sales manager. Tell me, I guess I'd like to hear you talk a little bit. I mean, we talk about the science of selling. Is sales management also a science? I mean, could any good salesperson eventually be a sales manager with the right science and and practices and behaviors, or does it also require some personal attributes?
Jim Pancero:
:So yeah, anybody, if they're coached and trained properly, can be effective in the job. I mean, it's not like you have to have this magic thought process in your mind. The only one out of every 200 people have that will make you more effective. It's, that's focusing back on the art. So one of things that happened is because basically the structures of selling is within within the last 40 or 50 years before that, there wasn't anything on structures. The only teaching was on the steps of a sales call with the assumption that was it, so that the people didn't have any of the in-depth background that would help make it effective. Here's the problem with management, though. Why did you become a sales manager? There's one of four reasons. The first reason was you outsold everybody else. Don't worry, there's three more. The second reason is you sucked up more than anybody else. Hey, boss. Cool car. The third reason, the third reason was Dad thought it was time.
Todd Miller:
:There you go. Yeah.
Jim Pancero:
:We call those CEOs, children employed by owners. Great title, anyway. But the fourth reason was the company realized taking you out of the field and putting you in management will have the least negative impact on total corporate sales.
Ethan Young:
:That's a good one.
Jim Pancero:
:But here's the challenge. That's a great joke, but here's the challenge. If we look at a company for getting job titles, there's only three positions. You're either a doer, where your job is to do something and you're only measured on your personal production of what you do. You're a doing manager, where you have to be doing something as well as managing others doing it. A supervisor that is running a machine tool and also supervising five other is running machine tools or a sales manager who's also carrying territory. You see that a lot in smaller businesses where part of the day they're acting like their own salesperson for their own accounts and they're also helping some other salespeople as their manager. That's a doing manager. The third level is the managing manager. The managing manager by definition does nothing, and it's always a great joke when we're talking about the boss or the people that you hired to do the training for. But this idea that the head of GM is not going to sell any cars today, nor are they going to assemble any it's not their job, the job of the managing managers, make sure everybody else has all the resources, the tools, the training, the awareness and the direction of what we need to do. And the problem we have is we take the head doer, which was the top sales rep, and we promote them to management, but they don't approach sales management as a managing manager. They approach sales, they approach sales management as the head doer. So they'll say to a sales rep, Take me out, let's go out and close some business. Talking as a doer, not as a manager. So this big difference is we've got to wake the sales managers up and say your job is not to do. Did you see the television series at HBO had Band of Brothers about World War Two? If you didn't know this, this amazing series of creating Easy Company through the entire World War Two and what they did, probably one of the most decorated and most active units in World War Two. And it's basically this, it was a series and the series arc went from one of the soldiers that was just a soldier with the rest of them kept getting field promotions because everybody was following him so that he became head of the. He was, I think, a colonel. And there was this one scene in the end of the movie where they were debriefing everybody as kind of their exit interview from the military. And this general was interviewing this colonel and looking here and says it says here in the records that when we made you an officer, you never fired your weapon. Once after that point for two years, even though you were leading all these battles in your people through it. And the generals sat back and said, that's the best damn sign of leadership I've ever seen. And if you look at what our sales managers do it, we take. I'm the sales rep, you're my manager. I take you on a sales call, you step in and try to close the business.
Todd Miller:
:Yeah.
Jim Pancero:
:You act as a doer, not as a manager.So can anybody be a sales manager? Yeah, but we've got them to be approaching it as an actual manager, not as the head doer.
Todd Miller:
:Gotcha. And some people simply will never be comfortable with that either.
Jim Pancero:
:Oh, yeah, their egos. If if you need to be the star of the show, you can't be a manager because managers are support to make their people the star of the show.
Ethan Young:
:Mm hmm, yeah.
Todd Miller:
:Good point.
Jim Pancero:
:Yeah, but. But they. They could do the job. Except now we got a bigger problem in a lot of companies, and that is in a lot of cases. We joked about it earlier, but the now the person that's in charge of the sales team has never sold themselves. They never actually worked as a salesperson, so they have no idea what's going on. It's like you or me trying to manage a band of musicians, but we never played and we don't really understand the culture of music, so that becomes even more challenging. So then all we do is work on to the the complaining about technical stuff. In fact, I have a visual here. Let me show you real quick as part of this. Because it gets into saying, where is your bias? As as a sales manager, we can talk about where you're selling skills are. We can also purchase sales managers. If we look at what skills do we need to have in either a good salesperson or a good sales manager. It's three points on the triangle. You need to have strong selling skills if you're a salesperson or no selling structures as a sales manager to coach to. You need to understand technically the products in the industry that you're selling to. I'll tell customers your company is a great example. I could do training for your company, but I could never become a salesperson for your company because I don't have the technical and the industry knowledge and experiences that would make me effective, even though I know how to sell and I know the business of selling. Or the third skill is you understand the business and the financial skills, financial needs of your customer, so you understand how they make money and how they get payback. And so the problem is most most managers, if you've never sold before, you can't do anything on the top area. So all you do is you track the numbers and show you people they're not year-to-date with where they need to be and you might have some technical skills and that's it. So one of the things to look at is how do we have a balance in our salespeople by focusing on all three sets of skills. So we also have our sales managers having awareness of all three sets of skills.
Todd Miller:
:I want to switch gears a tiny bit, too, and ask, you know, what are your thoughts on personality profiling of candidates for sales and sales management? So we'll go away from the salesperson who ends up being a salesperson because they've been there the longest or they know the products and look more at hiring someone specifically for selling and then you'll get them the right training. Do you suggest personality profiling? And if so, what should you be looking for?
Jim Pancero:
:I think it's been proven to work. But let's first identify that, because the first personality flexibility skills was Miller Heiman. The problem is you had to be a scientist. Most people don't remember what their letters were or if they did what it meant because it was so complex. So it was a complete psychological analysis, which was great for H.R. to have, but it didn't do much to help us. Sales managers say, Now how do I motivate and help this person do more? Then David Merrill and Roger Reid in the late sixties wrote a book called Personal Styles and Effective Performance, and it was the first book that was ever published on the four quadrants, the personalities, the driver, expressive, analytical, amiable, or the original. In fact, two companies took and bought rights to that book that were both in Minneapolis, where the authors were. It was Wilson Learning Systems and Performax, and they each published instrumentation measured, and each talked about how their stuff was so unique. But it all came out of the same source material, and it was effective because it was quick. It was simple that within 60 seconds you could identify where a customer is or where an employee is. So you know how to adjust your communications. Very effective. I think the thing that helps in sales is not that there's one perfect personality to be a salesperson. It is that they have an awareness of taking risk. If you're not, if you're risk averse, you're probably not going to be very effective in sales because you're afraid to push for the question. If one of the great books that on selling is the Challenger sales spun out a number of years ago, that's been on a number of years and it's taking risk where you're sitting a customer going, you know, there is why are you doing it this way? There's a better way to do it. Challenging the customer takes risk. Well, if you're risk-averse, you're probably not gonna be very effective.
Todd Miller:
:Yeah, makes sense.
Jim Pancero:
:So it's looking where's your if you have attention deficit. Oh look, a puppy. The right kind of individual, you're also not going to be effective. We had long-term complex sales. I found selling for IBM very challenging. It was an 18-month selling process. Now I viewed it as a chess game, but I found frankly, I wish it was moving at a faster pace than what it took, 18 months to sell this computer. So yeah, they could do it. And so what it does is it helps companies. The problem companies have with these instrumentations, because there's just a number of them out there today and most of them are very valid. The challenge that we have with it is the bias of the manager. Not identifying what personality is this person we're interviewing to see how they're going to fit in our organization. But the manager's biased that there's only one personality we need to be effective in sales, my personality. So if you're real sales-focused, you do it. I met one company, they bragged because the start of the company had an engineering background in the products they developed. And at one point, as we're interviewing, if I can do training for him, he bragged and said, Every one of our salespeople is an engineer. And I laughed and I said, Well, that's gonna double the price of your training. What do you mean? Well, engineers are not known for having the most personal personalities. You're not really risk takers. So anyway, that's that's in the balance. So, yeah, I think these instruments are really great. They're effective, frankly, any awareness you have before you hire somebody is effective awareness. My daughter had years ago she got a job selling for CBS Radio in Chicago. They had six stations in Chicago, and she was to be selling ads for all of them. And I was so impressed because after she did all these interviews, first they did them on Zoom. Then they had her face-to-face for some interviews. They said, okay, the last thing is they gave her a case study of one of their customers on threats we will fire you and we will hurt you if you contact this customer in any way or even stop in their store. But here's information on it. We want you to develop it and present to us an ad campaign that you would pitch to this. It was a liquor store, wine, spirits type of thing. And so she had to put together a presentation to give to them. They had no idea technically what she was talking about, they didn't care. They wanted to see, can she organize some thoughts to present to a customer to help them think? So is any of this awareness, any of these kind of things is just really strong and positive to help making a better decision of who you hire?
Todd Miller:
:Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense.
Ethan Young:
:So as someone who doesn't do much selling or sales or in the past few years, our company has started using a new sales presentation software and it's called Ingage. It's kind of like a, it's kind of like a modern take on PowerPoint with more capabilities, more advanced features, and stuff to make it more usable for the sales people and easier to digest for the customers. What are your thoughts on a system like that, or I guess the use of sales presentations in general?
Jim Pancero:
:From the beginning there has always been sales aids that have helped improve the message.
Ethan Young:
:Mm hmm.
Jim Pancero:
:If we go back to the 1960s, the sales aid was a demonstration of your product.
Ethan Young:
:Yeah.
Jim Pancero:
:A lot of buttons, let me show you how they work. So there were these, there's always been sales aids. If you go back to NLP, neurolinguistic programming. All of us are one of three basic types. We're either very auditory, where we only absorb it if we hear it. We're very visual, we only absorb it if we see it or we're very kinesthetic, where I will not have any idea what this product is unless I'm holding it.
Ethan Young:
:Yeah.
Jim Pancero:
:So, so the idea of having a blended presentation because, you know, we have to help a salesperson prepare a presentation. What's the best one we could prepare? Well, we could prepare a presentation that covered all three of those areas. That we had something that was visually to support what we're doing it so the customer can see what we're talking about. They hear us walk them through and we're able to hand it to them and have them touch it, feel it, and see what we're talking about. So it's a great idea. The challenge is, there's a phrase that we've all heard called 'death by PowerPoint.'
Ethan Young:
:Yep.
Jim Pancero:
:And the problem with 'death by PowerPoint' is the slides become the star. It's not the message. One of the things I would. I've used PowerPoints, in fact, before PowerPoint, before Microsoft PowerPoint, there was one. I forget what it was called, but it was the first ones out of this kind of basically slides through your computer. I got one of the first computer projectors when they came out in the early eighties, cost $10,000 at 200 lumens. That's about a little less than what, your phone. Yeah, but it was it blew people away because it was you had stuff that was professionally versed because other people were using overheads.
Ethan Young:
:Mm hmm.
Jim Pancero:
:The challenge is not the software. Frankly, my concern is using more advanced software like above, PowerPoint is dangerous because the people in the marketing throw so much stuff into it. Slides rolling in and rolling out. They use every bell and whistle. It's been interesting, when PowerPoints first came out, everybody had all it was you had an animation slide turns, words would slide in from the sides or pop up or dissolve. And every slide had a little bit of animation to it. And what we saw happened very quickly was that got very distracting and very boring very quickly. So if you look today, most slides like mine just appear. We don't have a blurring or blending in or anything else because it was distracting to the message. The worst thing you've seen is let me say it this way. A lot of the companies are like construction companies. Companies in the construction business will get their salespeople together for a sales meeting and to help pay for that sales meeting and the food, they'll have one of their their suppliers pay for the rights to feed the people, and for that they get at 15 or a 30 minute presentation right after lunch about why their products so great. So I have sat through hundreds of these presentations and they're all horrible because most of them here's what it looks like. The sales reps talking, staring at the slides themselves because that's their notes and all the customer sees is the back of their head.
Ethan Young:
:Yeah.
Jim Pancero:
:In fact, the best presentations are done with just some simple visuals. In fact, at a lot of companies today, they have found it's better to print out a couple of pages and show it to the customer than it is to try to set up a computer and have slides because the customers are so turned off to people with slides.
Ethan Young:
:Mm hmm.
Jim Pancero:
:It's interesting. I put a lot of professional work into my slides because I have a graphics background and in doing that I have a lot of pictures and artwork and stuff to help make it visually interesting. It's interesting how many customers when they hire me to do sales training. I've got to convince them to let me use PowerPoint because they're saying we're going to go through a full day training of PowerPoint slides.
Ethan Young:
:Yeah.
Jim Pancero:
:That kind of thing. So once again, it is a great tool if it's used properly and sparingly, I guess would be the best answer I could give with it. It's a positive assistance to the selling process. But by the way, an easy test is audio record somebody doing a practice presentation of these slides that you put together and just listen to the audio recording. It should be as persuasive as seeing the visuals, but if the audio presentation is weak, slides aren't going to save it.
Ethan Young:
:I think that's great, especially like what you're saying, like, you know, avoiding the medium, becoming the message, like you're not you're not focusing on the fancy like. And I will say the software that we use does have some of that, but it is a fairly like a minimal just presenting it. What it does more is like you can put video in it very easily compared to something like PowerPoint. You know, it offers a little more capability in the design, but I think it's a great warning because you don't want to overwhelm the customer. Just, Oh, I can put a video in here, so let's use a video here. You need to be very intentional with it you know.
Jim Pancero:
:There's another thing. The one of the things about selling, it's changed dramatically about every ten years since I've since I've been studying it. Looking back, I can walk you through if if we have time later what the evolution of selling because every ten years what it takes to be successful has changed that real quick. In the 1960s, success was based on giving a demo. The demos were all biased and customers wised up. So in the seventies, salespeople shifted and went to the high-pressure selling. So if you went through sales training in the 1970s like I did, you were taught how to squeeze a customer, how to put pressure on them. The closing techniques you learned structures of closing, the Ben Franklin close, the alternative choice close, the puppy dog close, all very manipulative to try to push a customer into saying yes. Turned off a lot of people and that's where salespeople got a lot of bad names was in the 1970s. So in the 80s, success came from relationships selling. Wait a second, no more pressure, no more hassles. Friends buy from friends, let's do lunch. And the relationship selling was you give them a bunch of free gifts hoping that that would make them your friends so you'd have a competitive edge when it came time to decide. Didn't work. People would take all the free gifts and still put it out to bid. So the 1990s, it became consultative selling. And consultative selling was based on, you know, friends don't buy from friends, friends buy from experts. And you gave a bunch of free consulting help to a customer and design help free with the idea that would win them over didn't help. So then you watch in around 2000, Amazon hit with the idea of speed, simplicity, and ease of use.
Ethan Young:
:Yep.
Jim Pancero:
:And if we look at each of these, one of the problems we have is the attention span of a sales call. Today is about half what it was five years ago pre-COVID. So a salesperson comes in with their laptop, say, can I plug into your projector? The first question the customers ask is how long is this going to take?
Ethan Young:
:Yeah.
Jim Pancero:
:And the problem is, if we have all these fancy slides put together, that means you have a long presentation. These presentations should be no more than five or ten minutes at most. So it's great to have slides. I'm not against slides I use all the time. No, but we got to go on the assumption. Wait a moment, we're hopefully talking about ten minute presentation sets of slides, not a half hour to walk the customer through everything about your company.
Ethan Young:
:Well, and I especially think, you know, you mentioned Amazon, but especially with the way people shop online nowadays, like you're competing with that instant, Oh, I don't like this. I'm going to go to the next, you know, the next source. I'm gonna go to the next company right away. You have to you know, you're not going to have a ton of time always. I think that's definitely a very apt point.
Jim Pancero:
:I was sitting through a presentation where the vendor had committed they had a half hour presenting, was going through a lot of slides. And halfway through it, the owner who was sitting in the middle of the room takes out a clicker like this and starts going like this. And finally the guy speaking said, What are you doing? He says, I'm trying to get you to fast forward. It works on my TV. Why the hell is it not working here? So it's a good thing. It's kind of like salt in your food. If you put just a little bit on, it really enhances the flavor. If you load it up, you can't finish it.
Ethan Young:
:Yeah. Okay.
Todd Miller:
:What impact, and you mentioned sales running in cycles, changing every so many years, what impact do you think the pandemic? Is it going to be one of those catalysts to create a permanent change in how we sell?
Jim Pancero:
:No, it just hurt us. It hurt us. Look at it this way. Because of what happened with COVID. Now, by the way, it was fascinating. I would talk to businesses a couple, like two years into COVID. How's it going? Oh, we're down two salespeople so our sales managers are having to sell. Customers don't want us in their office. So we're having, we're doing it remotely now and we're having to do everything by Zoom or by telephone, and we can't get in front of them. And it's just a big hassle. And I go, Yeah, and again, we're making record profits. So the problem that happened with COVID was that for three years, salespeople were pushed into a support role where the only thing for three years salespeople had to do was apologize to the customer for the supply chain disruptions, deal with all the backlog problems they were having. Price was no longer an issue. If you get it for me, I'll pay whatever you want. So it wasn't a pricing challenge kind of environment. You could set the price and the customers would accept it because this was the only place we could get it and the customer's attention span got a lot shorter. So as we look at it now, we're coming out of COVID now and business is picking up. Things are improving. I see a major difference in business success today versus what it was in like November or September of even last year. The problem we have, though, is we have had three years of salespeople conditioned to be support people, to be service people, to be apologetic in what they did. But there wasn't a lot of new selling and there wasn't a lot of prospecting and there wasn't a lot of new application development and there wasn't a lot of competition you had to worry about because if you could get it, you could sell it at any price you wanted because the competitors couldn't get it. Now all of a sudden things are opening up, marketplaces are improving, customers are doing more shopping, all these things are happening and salespeople aren't prepared and managers aren't doing anything to reintroduce selling to the job of selling. So if we look at that's biggest impact COVID had, it also trained our customers that you don't have to be in my office coughing in my face for me to buy from me. Look, by the way, also, there's something else that happened at the same time COVID was impacting selling. We had another major shift that happened. But because of COVID, it was all blamed on COVID. But the shift was the generational shift. Today, most decisions in most cultures and companies are run under a millennial type of philosophy, the values that millennials have. Baby boomers are no longer in the decision-making positions or setting how we go about buying things. So it's amazing. I had yesterday a conversation with a customer that I've been working with, and we had a 20 minute sales call by text. I never talked to them. In fact, I even said, Do you want to just pick up the phone and talk to me? Because, no, I'm at an airport. This would be inappropriate. Let's just keep going. And I sold some stuff and it was selling by text. And if you would have gone to me ten years ago and say, What do you think that's going to happen? I go, There's no way in hell that's going to happen. And so if we look, look how shorter sales calls are. Boy, a number of years ago, I did a video series for a company and they said, we want every video to be only 10 minutes long. Best your program up in a ten minute segments. Yeah, it was a crisis for me. I thought, what a waste this is. Why the hell are we doing this? Today, all of my videos are posted under 2 minutes. Because the attention span has changed. And frankly, a lot of them aren't watching the whole 2 minutes. They watch 30 to 60 seconds, then move on to something else. So if we look on sales calls, having a half-hour sales call with a customer is likely not going to happen unless it's after they've bought and you're only in implementation mode. But in selling mode, you're not going to have a half hour. They don't want it. In fact, a lot of companies are saying, we don't want to see you on site. Let's do it by Zoom, mainly because it's easier to end the call than it is to get you out of my office.
Ethan Young:
:That's pretty true, yeah.
Jim Pancero:
:And if you look at, you know, what millennials refer to, and Gen Z refer to emails as the way that old people communicate without a stamp. So it's this bias of communication of what's going on. They say Facebook is meant for grandparents to irritate their grandkids.
Todd Miller:
:Yeah. Yeah, I could see that. So I'm kind of curious. So where would you prognosticate that perhaps sales is going to go next? I mean, one of the things I'm hearing a lot about these days and in fact, in a few weeks I'm going to be talking about so I need to figure this out, is that the customer experience may be a lot of what drives successful selling going forward. And, you know, I think even what you experienced with your customer, hey, I'm fine with text. In fact, it works best for me right now. You know, that was meeting a good customer experience for that person. So where do you think sales might be going next or any any prognostications on that?
Jim Pancero:
:Yeah, the trends are pretty significant. The first trend is at the same time we talk about how the delivery of the message is changing, the process of persuasion and what it takes to sell has not. It's just using different vehicles.
Ethan Young:
:Mm hmm.
Jim Pancero:
:We go back to the 1970s and, wow, sending a customer something by fax was considered leading edge.
Todd Miller:
:Hey, I remember that.
Jim Pancero:
:No, I'm serious. My, family, in the old days, in the late 1800s and early 1900s had a meatpacking business. And my great grandfather, there was a company, a major car dealership still in business today in Cincinnati that was just starting out and they needed money. And the banks wouldn't loan him money because they considered cars too risky. So my great grandfather, I think it was, loaned money to this guy to start his business. He started it and it was successful. He came back to repay my great grandfather and my grandmother said, No, don't give me the money, give me a truck. So he took a truck in trade instead of repaying the loan, they repaid it by a truck. And so my family was one of the first trucks delivering meat in Cincinnati. And people would throw rocks at the truck because they thought it was an internal combustion engine was going to contaminate the food where a horse wouldn't be. So that it was just the bias of people that, you know, a vehicle delivering food was considered obscene. So if we look, there's always these evolutions of technology. And what's working today, the basic concept of what it takes to be successful is not changing, and that is customers have a need. How effective are you at helping them fulfill that or identifying how you can help solve that need in such a way that it improves the customer's lives? The delivery process of how we do that, I'm sure, is going to keep changing. But the bottom line process. So what it takes to be persuasive. Part of that is, it's always going to be if you focus on the customer more than your competition does, you'll have a competitive advantage. If you can show the customer that you can offer a better approach than the competition, you'll win the business. See, I had a couple really great things in my background that really shaped what I focus on today. The first was I sold for four years and had no idea what it's doing, and as I built the skills, I saw it corrected from being incompetent to actually working. But then the second thing is, when I sold for IBM, we were 20% more expensive than any of our competition for the exact same processing speeds and throughputs. So I had to learn at a very early age, how do you sell something with a 20% premium that the customer considers a commodity? And so those just contributed so of the focus of what it takes in selling. So if we look at this 50 year archive head of being a salesperson, which is the official definition of saying you're old. In this 50 year arc, a lot of the attributes of what it takes to be successful and what it takes to satisfy customers needs have not changed. It's just kind of the delivery. We've changed from a bicycle. We change from a horse to a bicycle to a motorcycle to a truck, but we're still doing the same thing. We're moving distances.
Todd Miller:
:Yeah, you mentioned bicycle there and you reminded me of something. So Dave Sandler wrote a book called You Can't Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar. And, you know, his point was in sales, it's all about repetition and training and practice. Can you reflect a little bit on how you see those things playing a role into being successful in selling?
Jim Pancero:
:I think he's right on target. You know, it's interesting how. Look at what happened with, I remember one of my first customers was a satellite dish company, and this was when the satellite dishes were like eight feet across, these big, massive things you put in your backyard. So I bartered one. So I had one of the first satellite dishes. It was just so exciting to sit there and look at all the channel feeds from the different news sources as the announcers would adjust their colors and stuff before they switched to them and blow their nose and all this other. It was exciting times. But what was fascinating was there was one day that the space shuttle was going to be up and they were going to televise the entire day of this big spacewalk they were doing. I've always been fascinated by space. I've read a lot of books on the space shuttle and stuff, and I thought, I'm going to treat myself and just watch the entire day of this of these broadcasts of this spacewalk. Well, I did some paperwork and it was boring as hell and it was very monotonous. And everything else said at one point, this astronaut is floating in space where he's tethered to the space shuttle. But that's it. He is floating on his own, looking down at the earth. And one of, and mission control said to the astronaut. So how's it feel to finally be there? And his comment blew me away. What he said was, Just like practice.
Todd Miller:
:Hmm.
Jim Pancero:
:Just like. Just like the water tank back in Houston.
Todd Miller:
:Yeah.
Jim Pancero:
:And what he was saying was he had done this so many times in practice in his scenarios, replicating the situation. When he was actually in space, it wasn't that big a deal. Because he was doing everything, the muscle memories that he'd been taught with all this practice. I think selling's the same way. So it's like how much practice, how much roleplaying do you do with a salesperson? We're getting to our season where everybody is going to be selling or looking. Now this is the time people, this next three months are when everybody buys a roof. As an example, let's just take that for a moment, if that was true. What is amazing how the companies don't do any preparation work for the salespeople to get them ready for this big season of selling. The assumption is for most companies, experienced equals trained. So you've been selling for us for five years. The assumption is you don't need training. You're don't need any coaching. Just get out and do it. So what happens is the people are ineffective. Look at trade shows. The average trade show person working a trade show, the average company spends more time talking to the sales rep about when they're supposed to be in the booth than what they ever say to them, what they want him to say while they're actually in the booth.
Todd Miller:
:While they're in it, yeah.
Jim Pancero:
:So the first day of trade shows really is horrible because the salespeople are still trying to figure out what to say and how to get it done. The second day, things start to really cook for them because now they found a rhythm and things are going well. So that it's this, we need experience, we need training, we need coaching. So role playing or any of those kind of things are just positive so that when they get in front of a customer, they're not surprised.
Todd Miller:
:Yeah, good stuff. Well, this has been great, Jim. Very informative. We're really close to the wrapping up the business end of things. Is there anything we haven't covered today that you want to make sure you share with our audience?
Jim Pancero:
:I think there's there's two real quick ideas I would share that I think are important. The first is you can always sell more. Selling is a science. You need to study the skills, the structures, the processes. A great book, it's been out for decades, but a great book on the steps of a sales call is Spin Selling by Neil Rackham. S-P-I-N, Spin Selling. Read the Challenger sale that we mentioned earlier that it talks about how to have a different approach to a customer compared to your competition, understanding that this is skills and we need to build the skills. Watch my videos. I post three videos a week on LinkedIn and also post them to YouTube. They're free. It's free training for salespeople, and there's managers to be watching videos and reading stuff to see what's happening. The second thing is the biggest problem in selling I watch for the average salesperson is they're opera singers. Because all they do is stand in front of the customer and go me, me, me, me, me. It's just consistent so that they develop. How do you develop rapport with a customer? Well, you tell them about your vacation. We don't talk about the customer's vacation. We tell you about my vacation. What happened to me driving over here? Me, me, me. One of the things critical is it's some people called second step selling. Forget about yourself. If you focus on the customer as the first step in their needs, then they'll satisfy your needs as a second step. There's only four reasons why people buy. It's universal language of selling. There's only four reasons. And if you can explain those any one of those four reasons to your customer of how you'll do it better than the competition, you gain a competitive advantage. The only four reasons why people buy is, number one, I chose you over anybody else because you did more than anybody else to lower my risk. Branding. If I can trust the brand, it's a lower risk option. So if I need a TV, I should know a Sony is going to work, even if it's not the cheapest one. It's a lower risk. The second reason is you did more than anybody else to make my life or work easier as a buyer.
Ethan Young:
:Yep.
Jim Pancero:
:So you buy the grill and you have them pay the extra 20 bucks so that they assemble it so you don't have parts left over when you assemble it. It makes your life easier. You pay for that. Amazon is not the cheapest way to get this stuff, but I'm an avid Amazon user because I don't have to get in my car and go drive to a place to buy something. I can have it ordered in 5 minutes. It is making my life easier. That's their biggest competitive edge. The third reason is you did more than anybody else to either increase my profitability or lower my total costs. So you don't have to be the cheapest, you just have to be the lowest total cost.
Ethan Young:
:Mm hmm.
Jim Pancero:
:The cheapest tires you can buy are the ones made in South Korea. You just don't want to take them on the road. It's too dangerous. But if you look at what's the lowest total cost tire, it's going to be Michelin because it's a harder ride, harder rubber, lasts twice as long. So if you look at the cost per mile over the life of the tire, Michelin is a much cheaper alternative, even though it's maybe three times the cost of what the Korean tires would be. Lower total costs. So that's one of the things I teach salespeople. If you're always going to be a higher price, start bragging about it. Tell the customer, Look, we're most likely not going to be your lowest price, but we will be your lowest total cost if you let us explain how we want to support you. And the fourth reason is you did more than anybody else to increase their competitive advantage. So if we can talk as a salesperson about how I can lower your risk to make your life or work easier in such a way that we're going to give you the lowest total cost option, even though you're going to pay more upfront, and that's going to increase your competitive edge by improving the quality of what you're selling. That's a pretty strong message. But look, it's all focused on the customer. It's not focused on me, what I want, what I have, or what I do. In fact, this is probably the most I've talked about in any interview about my past life of what I did as a salesperson, because my assumption is nobody cares except my mom. And so as part of this, the idea is how do we focus? So if I tell a story. Great example. I shared the one earlier about playing chess. My example was if I only think one move here, but you think two moves, how many games will you win? I would bet most salespeople would flip it and say, Look, if we're playing chess and I think two moves ahead, you only think, one, I'm going to win every game.
Ethan Young:
:Mm hmm.
Jim Pancero:
:Opera singers. Me, me, me, me, me. So as a salesperson, we need to reverse that process. As a sales manager, we need to forget about ourselves and focus on our people of how we make them stars, not how we continue our stardom. Selling today is about focusing on the person you're trying to persuade, not having it be a success for what you do personally. While it's very exciting to be part of this, I hope that they check out the videos. They're free that you can watch on LinkedIn and on YouTube. I hope you just continue to be a student of selling because we know you're good. Now the only question is, are you ready to get even better?
Todd Miller:
:Better, I love it. Well, Jim, this has been great. We have something we do here on the show that this may surprise you. Before we completely close out, and I'll ask you to share some information on how people can see those videos and contact you. We have something we call our rapid fire questions. So these are seven questions. You're not going to have a clue what we're going to ask. We're going to ask you if you're willing, and all you got to do is give a quick answer for them. Are you up to the challenge?
Jim Pancero:
:I hope this is edited.
Todd Miller:
:Well it can be, absolutely. But probably no need to. Okay, we're going to ask you seven questions. We will alternate, I will let Ethan ask the first one.
Ethan Young:
:So first question, What is a recent product that you bought that's been kind of a disruptor or a game changer for you?
Jim Pancero:
:My camera.
Ethan Young:
:Okay.
Jim Pancero:
:Photography is a major passion of mine. I take about 20,000 photos a year. Do you want to see them?
Ethan Young:
:Wow.
Jim Pancero:
:But I just bought. I upgraded, I always use a professional camera. I should say the last 15, 20 years I've used a professional camera because I take so many pictures. And my, what I want out of a camera.
Ethan Young:
:Yeah.
Jim Pancero:
:And I just upgraded to the latest camera that Canon makes. That is a game changer. The way it focuses, the way it takes pictures is, it's like a light saber. It's radically different.
Ethan Young:
:It's not the R7?
Jim Pancero:
:Costs more money, but I am so excited about it because it is a game changer.
Ethan Young:
:Is it the R6 or is there a newer one?
Jim Pancero:
:R7.
Ethan Young:
:R7, okay, yeah.
Jim Pancero:
:I do a lot of wildlife photography. So it has some focusing that it actually focuses on the eye of the bird. So if the birds flying at a 45 degree angle, it stays in focus the whole time. Very geeky, very exciting.
Ethan Young:
:I mean, that's cool. I, when I was looking you up before the show, I saw that you had some photography stuff and some old cameras in the background of one of your shots. And I thought, Oh, that's kind of cool. I got into photography a couple of years ago, so I'm just learning. It was cool to hear about it, so.
Todd Miller:
:Question number two. What would you like to be remembered for?
Jim Pancero:
:Living to 200?
Todd Miller:
:A great answer.
Jim Pancero:
:What I hope to be remembered for, and it's what I've really committed my life to, which is helping others get better and understanding how selling can work more effectively and sales leadership for them. I see myself first and foremost as a teacher. So the legacy I hope I leave is in how I helped others.
Todd Miller:
:Very good.
Ethan Young:
:Alright. Next question. This one could be a little cheesy, maybe, but what's the best or worst piece of advice you've ever been given?
Jim Pancero:
:From my father. Oh, my God. Don't leave IBM. Why are you giving up all that insurance? I was so proud, he said in a presentation about three years later, and he said, You know, this is who you are.
Ethan Young:
:Mm hmm.
Todd Miller:
:You did the right thing.
Jim Pancero:
:You did the right thing.
Todd Miller:
:That's awesome. Question number four. Okay, what non-family person have you had regular contact with the longest in your life?
Jim Pancero:
:He just passed away.
Todd Miller:
:Aww, I'm sorry to hear that.
Jim Pancero:
:My friend from high school, lifelong friends, talked all the time, did a lot of stuff. And he just passed away and we were friends from high school.
Todd Miller:
:Wow. I'm sorry to hear that, though, but.
Jim Pancero:
:It happens.
Todd Miller:
:Good memories. Without a doubt. Very neat.
Ethan Young:
:Alright, next one. Let's say that you're trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. What is the one person that you definitely want on your team?
Jim Pancero:
:A salesman. So we can throw him at the door and have them go after them first.
Ethan Young:
:That's a good one, yeah.
Todd Miller:
:You got a quick answer for everything. Okay, next-to-last question. Jim Pancero, are you a morning person or more of a night owl?
Jim Pancero:
:Definitely a night owl. And my partner, she's very much of a morning person, so it's like sometimes we're on different shifts. When I was, I've written three different books, and when I was writing the book and I had to just get it done and just for like two weeks straight was just writing. I would get up at noon, work till about five or six in the morning and just work through the afternoon all night and then go to bed and just sleep through the morning. And I had the most energy doing that. It's understanding circadian rhythm.
Todd Miller:
:I would've guessed the opposite of you. Yeah, very neat.
Ethan Young:
:Last one. Are you more of a dog person or a cat person?
Jim Pancero:
:Oh, I'm a dog person. I'm allergic to cats. I actually have an allergy to their dandruff and always, I've always had a dog and just, it's great fun.
Todd Miller:
:Well, before I ask you to provide some information, love to hear the name of your books, too. I will recap our challenge words. I think we were all successful.
Jim Pancero:
:Well, I think I missed on monotony.
Todd Miller:
:Oh, you didn't get it worked in.
Jim Pancero:
:Well I did now.
Todd Miller:
:Well, there you go.
Ethan Young:
:That works.
Todd Miller:
:Success. Good deal.
Jim Pancero:
:I stole Ethan's word of cheese. So I apologize.
Ethan Young:
:Ahh, that's alright. I did get cheese in there. I kind of used cheesy. I don't know if that counts or not, but.
Jim Pancero:
:We'll give it to you. My word was barbaric. I don't remember how I used it, but some place I worked it in. So good stuff.
Jim Pancero:
:That's funny.
Jim Pancero:
:So, Jim, again, this has been a real pleasure and very, very interesting. Great stuff. We could talk much longer, but for folks who do want to get in contact with you or maybe just follow what you're up to or read those books, what are ways they can most easily do that?
Jim Pancero:
:I brought up one of the slides, the ending slides I have in my presentation. I thought it might help. My email address is jim@pancero.com. You can follow me on LinkedIn where, LinkedIn has been very successful for me. I get about a thousand people view my videos for each one I post, so very, very exciting. It's having an impact on my business. I have products that, I have two products now. We have a third one that's about to come out, but it's available at advancedsalesuniversity.com. And if you have any questions, if you call me, I am happy to answer your questions. A lot of people help me along the way. I view that as my responsibility to continue by helping them along the way.
Jim Pancero:
:Great stuff. Very good. Well, you're very successful at changing the lives of others. So we thank you for that, Jim. This has been great. Thank you very much for guesting on the show today. We appreciate it.
Jim Pancero:
:It's exciting. It's my favorite industry, is construction. It's always fun riding with salespeople, visiting job sites and writing and making sales goals, selling roofing materials. All this stuff is very exciting because it's having such an impact on the world.
Jim Pancero:
:It does, it does indeed. Well, thank you so much to our audience for tuning into this episode of Construction Disruption with Jim Pancero of Jim Pancero, Inc. Again, you can reach him at jim@pancero.com. We'll put the information in the show notes as well. So I encourage you to please watch for future episodes of our podcast. We're always blessed with great guests, and don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or YouTube. Until the next time we're together, keep on disrupting and don't forget to have a positive impact on everyone you encounter. Make them smile and encourage them, simple yet powerful things. In the meanwhile, God bless, take care. This is Isaiah Industries signing off until the next episode of Construction Disruption.
Jim Pancero:
:Intro/Outro: This podcast is produced by Isaiah Industries, a manufacturer of specialty metal roofing and other building products.