The Charlie Kirk Show - How to Pour Rocket Fuel on Your Career with Jim Holden
Aired: 2021-03-01
Duration: 35:23

[00:00:00]  Hey, everybody.
[00:00:01]  Special episode of the Charlie Kirk Show today, an exclusive conversation with my friend, Jim Holden.
[00:00:09]  I've known Jim for years, and I actually helped contribute to his latest book, Selling in an Anxious World.
[00:00:15]  And so, if you guys want to check out this book, go to sellingcharlie.com and use the special code Turning Point.
[00:00:22]  Just keep that in mind throughout this entire episode.
[00:00:24]  Jim Holden is a dear friend.
[00:00:26]  He's a good man and a great person in a variety of different ways.
[00:00:30]  You have a lot to learn from Jim Holden.
[00:00:33]  If you want to support our podcast, go to charliekirk.com/slash support or email us, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:00:40]  Jim Holden is here.
[00:00:41]  Remember, sellingcharlie.com, special code TurningPoint.
[00:00:45]  Buckle up.
[00:00:46]  Here we go.
[00:00:47]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:00:49]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
[00:00:51]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:00:54]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:00:58]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:00:59]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:01:00]  His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
[00:01:08]  We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
[00:01:17]  That's why we are here.
[00:01:20]  By now, you've heard me talk about how my pillow is terrific.
[00:01:24]  And look, Mike Lindell is under fire right now.
[00:01:28]  And so maybe you're going for a walk.
[00:01:29]  Maybe you're riding your bike.
[00:01:31]  Maybe you're shoveling some snow.
[00:01:33]  You say, Mike Lindell, Mike Lindell is under fire.
[00:01:37]  And so if you want to support Mike Lindell, who's a courageous American, he's a friend of mine, then there's one way you can do it.
[00:01:46]  You can buy great pillows that are made here in America.
[00:01:48]  You can wash and dry them, and you know how great they are.
[00:01:51]  You see the commercials and all this.
[00:01:53]  But look, I'm going to tell you something that no one else is going to tell you is that Mike Lindell loves America and that millions and millions of people want to help Mike Lindell.
[00:02:03]  I know I get emails from people all the time, thousands of people.
[00:02:06]  They say, how can we help Mike Lindell?
[00:02:09]  How can we get behind Mike Lindell?
[00:02:11]  How can we support Mike Lindell?
[00:02:13]  So go to mypillow.com and guess what?
[00:02:15]  You can support two people at once.
[00:02:17]  So you can support Mike Lindell, the Charlie Kirk Show, and get something in return.
[00:02:21]  You might say, how do I do that?
[00:02:23]  You go to mypillow.com and click on Radio Listeners, Radio Listeners Square, and use the promo code Kirk.
[00:02:29]  It's that easy.
[00:02:30]  So mypillow.com.
[00:02:32]  I know that a lot of you want to get Mike Lindell and you say, how can I help?
[00:02:36]  Go to mypillow.com, promo code Kirk.
[00:02:40]  You can get a queen-size premium, MyPillow for $29.98.
[00:02:43]  Support the fighters, metaphorical, of course.
[00:02:47]  I know a lot of you want to do that.
[00:02:48]  Go to mypillow.com, Radio Listener Square, promo code Kirk.
[00:02:52]  It helps me.
[00:02:52]  It helps Mike.
[00:02:53]  And you get a pillow and you sleep well.
[00:02:56]  God bless America.
[00:03:01]  Hey, everybody.
[00:03:02]  Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:03:04]  I am thrilled to have with us today a friend of mine, someone who I've learned a lot from, and someone who has a very exciting new book out, Jim Holden.
[00:03:12]  He has a new book called Selling in an Anxious World.
[00:03:15]  Boy, isn't that the truth?
[00:03:16]  Driving sales success by crossing the crevice from bad to good culture.
[00:03:21]  And this book is, I think, helpful for all people, even if you're not in the sales world.
[00:03:25]  There are so many amazing nuggets of wisdom to be shared in this book.
[00:03:29]  Jim, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:03:32]  Thank you, Charlie.
[00:03:33]  It's great to be with you.
[00:03:34]  I'm really excited to be here.
[00:03:35]  Awesome.
[00:03:36]  And incidentally, I would also like to thank you for your contribution to our new book, Selling in an Anxious World.
[00:03:44]  What you did with the chapter that you wrote was great, illuminating culture, war, and the universities and how that could impact corporations with a younger generation coming into the workforce.
[00:03:57]  So thank you for that.
[00:03:58]  Thank you.
[00:03:59]  I believe it is chapter six that I contributed to, culture and caring.
[00:04:04]  And I encourage everyone to check it out.
[00:04:06]  You and I spent a good amount of dinners and late nights going through that together.
[00:04:09]  That was a lot of fun.
[00:04:11]  So, Jim, why don't you just kick it off and tell us why you wrote this book and just walk us through the big ideas and then we can go from there.
[00:04:19]  Sure.
[00:04:20]  Happy to do that.
[00:04:21]  Well, Charlie, it goes back a couple of years, actually, when we as an organization began to observe that sales effectiveness was in decline.
[00:04:30]  And it wasn't clear why, what was happening, what was damaging sales.
[00:04:34]  So even with large companies, industry leaders, we're observing that they just were not growing organically.
[00:04:43]  And so we began to focus intensely and trying to figure out what was going on, what was happening.
[00:04:49]  Now, at the same time, part of our business is consulting and working with companies on very large, important pursuits where we provide guidance and direction.
[00:04:58]  It was there that we began to see what was essentially invisible, that the problem was all about culture conflict.
[00:05:05]  That is the conflict between the supplier's culture, the norms, the values that influence behavior, and that set expectations for how you get things done in the organization, conflict between that culture and what salespeople in the field had to do to be successful in servicing clients, winning business, that type of thing.
[00:05:26]  So we started to focus on that and very, very quickly realized that the problem is that culture is not visible.
[00:05:34]  People can't see it.
[00:05:36]  And so we decided, well, we're going to bring some structure here.
[00:05:40]  We began to work to categorize culture to create three types of culture, to identify three types of culture.
[00:05:49]  One that's good, one that's bad, and one that's a mixed deal.
[00:05:53]  Now, as we began to do that, we took a quantitative approach, if you will, very objective to being able to go in and assess culture.
[00:06:03]  We found that with some customer organizations, the culture was very positive.
[00:06:08]  And we termed that a client-centric culture, where the company really cares about clients and client experience, where they listen to the customer, where they bring thought leadership to the customer, really focusing on delivering value and at the same time, differentiating from the competition.
[00:06:27]  Very, very positive.
[00:06:28]  But when you talk to CEOs or corporate executives, they all tell you that, hey, customers are very important, customer satisfaction is very important.
[00:06:40]  But even in the book, we talk about a study where 80% of CEOs who were surveyed said they provide a superlative customer experience.
[00:06:52]  But yet, when they talk to their customers, only 8% agreed with that.
[00:06:56]  So there's a huge gap between what executives think is happening, but on the ground is actually not happening.
[00:07:03]  And that creates the opportunity for a bad culture, what we call looking glass culture.
[00:07:08]  Now, looking glass culture is one where it's like looking in a mirror because you're not focused on the customer and what's good for them.
[00:07:15]  You're focused on yourself.
[00:07:17]  This is a situation where the supplier really doesn't care about the customer, doesn't care about bringing thought leadership, doesn't care about making sure they make a contribution to their business.
[00:07:32]  Instead, the focus is on themselves and what they do.
[00:07:37]  And what happens there is that it puts the salesperson in a situation of conflict because either he does what's right for the customer and he alienates himself from the culture and the people that are part of that culture, or He goes along with the culture thinking and rationalizing that, hey, you know, customers will come and go, but I have to live with these people and I don't want my career to be damaged.
[00:08:07]  So he aligns with them.
[00:08:09]  And then that results in losing business and began to drive this decline in sales.
[00:08:15]  Well, you'd say, well, why don't executives do something about it?
[00:08:20]  Well, first of all, it's invisible, so they don't see it.
[00:08:24]  And they think everything's good, and it's not.
[00:08:26]  So it never gets addressed.
[00:08:28]  The problem with this looking glass culture that's so internally focused is that it damages sales in a way that's very, very difficult to fix because the company tends to go into, like people, a denial phase.
[00:08:49]  So when an opportunity is lost, they rationalize and say, well, you know what?
[00:08:54]  This customer wasn't very intelligent anyways.
[00:08:57]  They're not very competent.
[00:08:58]  In fact, their operational practices are somewhat dysfunctional.
[00:09:02]  You know, probably best that we didn't get that business, right?
[00:09:05]  They just rationalize it away.
[00:09:07]  They blame it on the customer, not being smart enough to see the value of their offerings, right?
[00:09:13]  Now, but after a while, and you lose enough business, there just can't be that many dumb customers out there.
[00:09:20]  So who do they blame next?
[00:09:22]  Now, after depersonalizing the customer, they depersonalize their own people and they blame the salespeople and they start firing salespeople.
[00:09:32]  We were brought into one situation with a major company, Fortune 100 company, that had fired all of its salespeople in North America.
[00:09:39]  The average tenure when we came in was a year and a half in a business where it takes 18 months just to get up to speed.
[00:09:48]  So, you know, with this kind of thing happening, this type of culture is very destructive.
[00:09:54]  And Charlie, it's not just about sales.
[00:09:57]  It's also important to customers that when they want to work with a company where they want to partner with a company, because when they're working with a client-centric supplier, it's a real partnership that starts with them, goes through sales all the way to RD, because RD then produces innovation that customers can really use.
[00:10:18]  They actually buy it.
[00:10:20]  But a looking glass culture will produce RD and innovation that nobody wants because nobody's talking to the customer.
[00:10:28]  And even if the customer tries to tell you, nobody listens.
[00:10:31]  So, Jim, can you help explain to our listeners how you diagnose that culture?
[00:10:36]  You go through this in chapter two, Hugh, where you assess it.
[00:10:41]  Can you go through some of the steps that you talk about?
[00:10:44]  Because there's a lot of people listening to this right now.
[00:10:46]  They do have jobs where they're in sales or they're in leadership and they're looking for ways to best assess their company culture.
[00:10:53]  What are some ways that you suggest that they go about and do that?
[00:10:57]  Well, the criteria really looks at what the supplier company is doing from a sales point of view.
[00:11:04]  And, you know, areas to focus on are the types of proposals and presentations that they give.
[00:11:11]  If you look at the proposal, is it all about the supplier or is it all about the customer?
[00:11:17]  Is the supplier aware of the customer's vision, direction, and priorities?
[00:11:22]  Are they projecting real value that's relevant?
[00:11:25]  Or is marketing spewing out generic stuff, most of which the customer has no interest in?
[00:11:32]  It doesn't relate to their business, but you know, it's one to many.
[00:11:35]  It's scale.
[00:11:36]  Scale the business.
[00:11:38]  Use technology.
[00:11:39]  Just throw it over the transom.
[00:11:42]  So when we get involved, we look from the customer's point of view at a particular company.
[00:11:47]  We looked at their presentation.
[00:11:49]  And you know what?
[00:11:50]  There are times when they don't even mention the customer's name.
[00:11:53]  It's all about them, all about them.
[00:11:56]  So what we did is we listed the sales, the bad sales practices that illuminate a looking glass culture.
[00:12:05]  And, you know, if there's one message I could deliver, Charlie, I think is really important.
[00:12:10]  It's to the young people today.
[00:12:12]  You know, they start their careers.
[00:12:14]  They join a company.
[00:12:15]  And I will tell you, I tell you the truth, one of the most significant things they can do as they look at joining a company is to assess its culture.
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[00:13:34]  What should the young people look for?
[00:13:37]  Exactly this.
[00:13:38]  When they go in, they're going to go through a structured recruiting process.
[00:13:42]  What they should do is take the criteria that we have in the early part of the book, ring up one or two salespeople, county executives, and just say, hey, I'm Jim Paul.
[00:13:53]  I'm looking at joining your company.
[00:13:55]  I want to like to chat with you, better understand the company and see if I can really provide value and if it's a good fit for me.
[00:14:02]  Would you talk with me?
[00:14:03]  And they will.
[00:14:04]  They'll tell you, hey, it's a great company.
[00:14:06]  You know, we're customer-centric.
[00:14:08]  We work with customers.
[00:14:09]  We partner with them.
[00:14:10]  We listen to them.
[00:14:11]  Or they may say, well, you know, it can be tough at times.
[00:14:16]  We have stack ranking here.
[00:14:18]  The bottom 10% in every department on every project gets fired every year.
[00:14:24]  Oh, and by the way, you know what?
[00:14:26]  If you decide to leave the company, you resign online.
[00:14:30]  Nobody really cares.
[00:14:32]  You know, you can, and this is so important because the trajectory of a young person's career will be set by that first company or two that they join.
[00:14:44]  If they join a good company, they will accelerate their career, reduce their time to success by at least five or more years.
[00:14:52]  It's that important.
[00:14:53]  Wow.
[00:14:53]  So if you just go beyond the recruiting process and take an unconventional, a non-traditional approach of understanding what is the real personality of the company I'm joining.
[00:15:05]  And it's not just about career success, Charlie.
[00:15:08]  It's about having some fulfillment, joy.
[00:15:11]  I would say to every young person who may be listening or watching this podcast, you are probably associated in some way with Turning Point USA, right?
[00:15:21]  Okay.
[00:15:22]  How do you feel about that?
[00:15:24]  You feel pretty good, right?
[00:15:26]  It gives you a sense of purpose, of meaning.
[00:15:29]  People respect you.
[00:15:30]  I mean, what are the things you don't see at Turning Point USA?
[00:15:33]  Bureaucracy.
[00:15:34]  It just ain't there.
[00:15:36]  Ego, it just ain't there.
[00:15:38]  I mean, people work together.
[00:15:40]  They help each other.
[00:15:41]  The Turning Point USA Today culture is a client-centric culture.
[00:15:46]  It cares about its people, its donors, and our country.
[00:15:51]  And you want to join a company as you start your career that's like that with a client-centric culture.
[00:15:58]  And you can make that determination because if you don't, you will set your career back and you will see the oxygen sucked out of the air.
[00:16:06]  It will be one of the most unhappy experiences that you can imagine.
[00:16:10]  So we have a client-centric culture.
[00:16:12]  We have a looking glass culture, which is bad, and we have a mixed or confused culture, which is a mix of the two.
[00:16:19]  So maybe in the North American division, it's client-centric, but in Europe, it's a looking glass.
[00:16:26]  And there you have to be very, very careful as well.
[00:16:29]  So, Jim, can you also, can you get to part two where you say a deep dive into culture?
[00:16:34]  And you talk about different types of power bases, foxes and jackals.
[00:16:38]  Can you explain that to our audience?
[00:16:40]  This is chapter five in your book that I want to repeat the title, Selling in an Anxious World.
[00:16:46]  Yeah, by all means, it is very, very critical whenever you're dealing with an organization that you separate influence from authority because they're not the same thing.
[00:16:57]  You can have high-level people in a company who have a lot of authority, but very little influence, maybe close to retirement, or have no interest in what you're doing.
[00:17:05]  Conversely, there can be a lower-level person who has influence disproportionate to his or her authority.
[00:17:12]  These people can exert influence across departmental lines, but it's like culture.
[00:17:18]  It's invisible.
[00:17:19]  Why?
[00:17:20]  If it were visible, these powerful people would be viewed as usurping some other manager's authority.
[00:17:26]  So they can't do it.
[00:17:27]  So what you have in an organization is a power base, a group of people networked together that exert influence across company lines.
[00:17:37]  And at the center is a fox.
[00:17:39]  A fox is a brilliant, high-integrity individual, rarely surprised by events, can work in exceptional policy.
[00:17:47]  And this person is the individual you want to align with.
[00:17:51]  When you're in a recruiting process, you're looking at joining a company.
[00:17:57]  The first thing you look at is, is it a culture I want to be in?
[00:18:00]  The second is, who am I going to work for?
[00:18:03]  Is this guy I'm going to work for in the power base or out of it?
[00:18:06]  Because if it's out of it, your career success is going to be dialed down dramatically.
[00:18:13]  In a corporation, your success from a career point of view is a function of not just providing value, but having that value recognized by powerful people who can promote you.
[00:18:26]  So if you go in and you work for a department and that department is out of the power base, you've just screwed yourself without knowing it.
[00:18:35]  In sales, it's imperative, you know, particularly on large ticket sales, big stakes, strategically or dollar-wise or Euro-wise.
[00:18:45]  You go in, it's imperative that you go beyond the decision-making people, the people formally involved in the procurement, and get to people in the power base who can create budget, who can give you a non-traditional source of competitive advantage to defeat competitors.
[00:19:02]  Politics is critical.
[00:19:04]  So the two areas that I feel strongly about for young people today, and by the way, this was a motivation in writing this book, was to help people.
[00:19:12]  And I know even on a podcast like this with an author, you think, well, okay, the intent is to sell books.
[00:19:19]  And that's great.
[00:19:20]  We'll sell books, but that's not why I'm here.
[00:19:22]  I'm here because I care people, care about people, and I want to see young people succeed.
[00:19:29]  Well, I know that about you, Jim.
[00:19:30]  And that's why I contributed to this book.
[00:19:32]  And we did that in chapter six.
[00:19:34]  And we talk about how college campuses are really not serving the best interest of its graduates and what it could possibly, what it could impact when it actually goes beyond the campuses.
[00:19:47]  I want to go to chapter seven.
[00:19:48]  Say, when seeing is not believing.
[00:19:51]  You say, quote, when people become preoccupied with their company culture due to the perceived career risk, they're not only in the culture, but of it.
[00:19:59]  With a diminished ability to see what's really happening, the irrational becomes rational and sales decline.
[00:20:03]  What do you mean by that?
[00:20:06]  Yeah, it's very simple.
[00:20:07]  And, you know, this book is pretty non-traditional and it uses a lot of metaphors and analogies to try and make the invisible visible by looking at it in different ways.
[00:20:18]  And one of those ways is scripture.
[00:20:20]  And scripture is really clear that, hey, you're going to be in a culture and you'll be in it, but you don't need to be of it.
[00:20:28]  You don't need to be of that culture.
[00:20:29]  That culture doesn't need to define you as an individual.
[00:20:33]  Just the opposite.
[00:20:35]  You want to be in sales.
[00:20:36]  You want to be successful in working with the customer.
[00:20:39]  You want to build good relationships over time with customers.
[00:20:42]  But at the same time, you don't want to be alienated.
[00:20:46]  You don't want management to view you as not being a team player because it will damage your career.
[00:20:51]  Yes.
[00:20:51]  So you have to balance.
[00:20:53]  You have to, you can create your own path.
[00:20:55]  And that's what the Bible's saying.
[00:20:57]  You can create your own path.
[00:20:59]  You're going to be part of the world.
[00:21:00]  You're going to be exposed to good things and bad things.
[00:21:04]  But you can make a difference for yourself, for your company, and for your family.
[00:21:10]  That's really well said.
[00:21:12]  Chapter eight, you say putting a face on culture.
[00:21:15]  In chapter eight, you're introduced to the concept of personifying culture to better understand how it actually works, what drives it, what threatens it, and how it protects yourself.
[00:21:24]  Can you talk about this on actually putting a face to culture?
[00:21:29]  Yeah, it's, you know, when you think about culture, it's this very abstract thing.
[00:21:36]  And the academics talk about it in ways that can be very esoteric.
[00:21:42]  And it's just not helpful.
[00:21:44]  It's not practical.
[00:21:46]  But culture is something that you can view as an entity that's living and breathing, that has intelligence, it has sustainability, it has tenacity, it has influence.
[00:22:01]  And so when I go up against any kind of adversarial situation, I tend to personify it.
[00:22:08]  I treat it like a person.
[00:22:09]  And one of the metaphors that we use, an analogy in the book, is dealing with multiple myeloma, which is a form of blood cancer.
[00:22:17]  And when I, and this happened to be in a feline model because I had a cat named Zuza, which means gift in Swahili, by the way.
[00:22:24]  And this little cat was diagnosed with cancer.
[00:22:27]  The vet said he's going to be dead in 90 days.
[00:22:29]  I mean, you know, we can do a textbook solution with chemo and this and that, but it isn't going to work.
[00:22:35]  I couldn't accept that.
[00:22:36]  So I took two years off work to develop a protocol.
[00:22:39]  What I did was I treated it as an adversary, as a thinking, tenacious adversary.
[00:22:46]  And so doing that, I looked for where does it get its strength from?
[00:22:50]  And I was able to determine the chemistry of how it developed its strength.
[00:22:55]  And then I took a version of that to create a protocol, which actually cured the cat.
[00:23:00]  Wow.
[00:23:01]  So personifying things.
[00:23:02]  And we've seen it in the arts, you know, Starlight Express, the play, and others, you know, where trains were personified.
[00:23:12]  You know, trains were treated as people in the play and so forth.
[00:23:16]  It can be in a very effective way of building non-traditional insights into situations that for most people are very confusing.
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[00:23:53]  Podium, again, what a great name for company.
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[00:24:01]  It's great.
[00:24:02]  Podium, what a great name for a company.
[00:24:04]  Podium web chat lets website visitors text with your team right from your homepage.
[00:24:10]  So let's talk about some of the success stories.
[00:24:13]  RPM Alamo increased their business by 24%.
[00:24:16]  They said, quote, we've generated more revenue, decreased vacancy rates, and pulled in more leads than we could in multiple years.
[00:24:22]  That is priceless.
[00:24:23]  The South Tampa Family in Cosmetic Dentistry collected over 1,200 reviews, averaging 4.9 stars, saying, quote, the number of walk-ins as a result of our reviews has skyrocketed.
[00:24:32]  Before we were seeing 50 to maybe 100 new patients a month, now we're seeing closer to 200.
[00:24:36]  So right now, get started today at podium.com slash Charlie.
[00:24:40]  Remember, podium gives your business the messaging tools to turn your website into a thriving storefront.
[00:24:45]  So maybe you have some form of a website and you're like, how do I drive business?
[00:24:48]  That's what you do podium for.
[00:24:50]  It's podium.com slash Charlie.
[00:24:52]  That's podium.com slash Charlie.
[00:24:57]  In part three of the book, you say winning important deals.
[00:25:01]  On one of them, it's the pursuit team and the pursuit team mission.
[00:25:05]  What is the pursuit team and why is it important that people that are in sales know about it?
[00:25:11]  Yeah, that's a great question.
[00:25:13]  When it comes to really large opportunities, and so in the U.S., they could be 100 million plus or even with government procurements over a billion USD.
[00:25:25]  When that happens, a team is formed.
[00:25:28]  And the tendency is for the team to not be configured correctly because so many people want to get involved with this major pursuit because it can be career advancing.
[00:25:38]  So it attracts people like moss to a light.
[00:25:42]  But what it also does is it creates great visibility for the lead sales executive and the sales team, the core team that have to make this successful.
[00:25:52]  Because everybody will be second guessing.
[00:25:54]  Everybody will be watching what that team's doing.
[00:25:57]  And this is where you run into the most significant cultural conflict on big deals.
[00:26:04]  Now, when that happens, a senior executive can tell the team lead to do X when the team lead knows that's a disaster and he really needs to do Y.
[00:26:16]  And at that point, the team lead has to make a decision.
[00:26:20]  Do I protect my career and do what the executive wants or do I risk losing a $100 million deal?
[00:26:27]  That conflict, we have a phrase for that.
[00:26:30]  We call it the monkey dance.
[00:26:32]  Tell me what that is.
[00:26:34]  It is, well, here's what happens.
[00:26:36]  And it's a real good analogy for culture.
[00:26:38]  You get a bunch of monkeys and you put them in a cage, right?
[00:26:41]  In this habitat.
[00:26:42]  And you build this little mountain.
[00:26:44]  And at the top of the mountain, you put some bananas.
[00:26:46]  Well, what happens?
[00:26:48]  The monkeys want to climb up and get the banana, right?
[00:26:51]  But when they do that, you spray them with cold water.
[00:26:54]  Well, okay, they learn pretty quickly.
[00:26:56]  After they get sprayed a few times, no longer do the monkeys want to go up to get the bananas anymore.
[00:27:02]  So then you take a monkey out of the cage and you put a new monkey in.
[00:27:08]  Guess what the new monkey wants to do immediately?
[00:27:10]  He wants to go up to get the banana.
[00:27:13]  But do you think you have to spray him with cold water?
[00:27:16]  No, don't have to.
[00:27:17]  Why?
[00:27:18]  The other monkeys stop him.
[00:27:21]  And this is what happens when somebody tries to operate counterculturally to make sure we win the deal, going up against the senior executive.
[00:27:30]  The other people, his colleagues, her friends, will actually come in and stop him or try to stop him from doing it.
[00:27:39]  Just like what happens with the monkeys.
[00:27:42]  So we developed an approach for solving the monkey dance problem.
[00:27:47]  And it involves having an executive sponsor for the account and how that individual can work in the white space to keep you from never getting into the monkey dance because it's tough to get out once you're in it.
[00:27:59]  And so how you configure your team, how you configure it and how your pursuit team operates is key to not only getting the business, but protecting you against the monkey dance.
[00:28:12]  Wow.
[00:28:13]  So chapter three or the third section of the book is all about that.
[00:28:17]  And by the way, just to come back to our young folks again for a moment, if they really want to fast track their careers, not only should they go and talk to salespeople in order to determine what culture they're going to walk into, but also to examine whether or not they might like to get into sales, because it's one of the fastest tracks to advancement, particularly if they're with a great company in big ticket selling.
[00:28:44]  That's exactly right.
[00:28:45]  And sales is more than the derogatory term some people use to describe it, right, Jim?
[00:28:50]  It's the art of persuasion.
[00:28:51]  It's the ability to be able to convince people to not just buy your product, but align with you and connect with you.
[00:29:00]  Can you talk about how the word sales is a filler word for actually something that's more comprehensive in the economy?
[00:29:08]  Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right.
[00:29:10]  And people do tend to view sales superficially because there are a lot of salespeople working in looking glass cultures and it's all about them.
[00:29:21]  Management is pushing them to close the deal this quarter, even if it's not in the best interest of the customer to do so.
[00:29:27]  Yes.
[00:29:27]  Even if it's going to damage relationships.
[00:29:30]  But sales is very much based upon caring and trust.
[00:29:35]  When you care about your customers, you will take the time to learn their business.
[00:29:39]  When you learn their business, you can bring thought leadership.
[00:29:43]  You can guide them not only to provide value, but to go beyond that and provide unexpected value.
[00:29:49]  And when you give them value that's unexpected, same thing when you're working for a company.
[00:29:54]  When you not only do what the boss expects you to do, but you go beyond that and create a value he didn't know was possible, it does wonders for your career.
[00:30:04]  Well, the same thing is true with sales.
[00:30:07]  Selling today is really a lot more consultative.
[00:30:11]  But if I had to use one word, it's about caring, caring for the customer, caring for your own company in a way that's balanced and building trust-based relationships where not only the customer trusts you, but also people in your own company that can provide you resources to better serve the customer.
[00:30:33]  They trust you.
[00:30:35]  And it all aggravates to the positive.
[00:30:37]  Totally.
[00:30:38]  That's perfectly said.
[00:30:40]  And the last part of the book, you say, imagine that you're climbing a mountain that symbolizes the relationship with your customer or the person that you have to persuade.
[00:30:48]  You qualified the mountain in that condition.
[00:30:51]  Conditions are good for the ascent from the base camp, but just as you would qualify an important opportunity.
[00:30:57]  But unlike selling, if you make a mistake, you could die.
[00:30:59]  This last part of the book deals with emotions that define and influence all of us when confronted with real challenges.
[00:31:05]  Can you help explore that with us?
[00:31:08]  I'm interested.
[00:31:10]  Yeah, you know, today we're seeing more and more risk aversity with companies than we've ever seen before.
[00:31:18]  In fact, with customers, you know, it used to be they would have certain needs.
[00:31:23]  They look for a solution.
[00:31:24]  They'd look at pricing, availability, delivery, kind of traditional stuff.
[00:31:28]  Today, the number one issue for most clients is managing risk.
[00:31:34]  And excuse me.
[00:31:35]  And as a result, often your competition can be no decision because they just perceive risk.
[00:31:42]  It could be career risk, risk for the company.
[00:31:44]  When you get onto a mountain, it's all about managing risk because there's going to be physical endurance required and emotional, psychological endurance required as well.
[00:31:56]  And you need on a mountain to have really good situational awareness.
[00:32:00]  If the freeze point's going up and avalanche conditions are going to set in, you need to be able to move quickly, decisively.
[00:32:08]  Everybody on your team has to move as a group, as a unit, and they have to trust you as the team leader.
[00:32:15]  There are a lot of analogies between mountaineering and sales because on big deals, people put their careers at risk.
[00:32:22]  Now, admittedly, it's commercial risk and not life-threatening.
[00:32:29]  But if I could, when I recruit people, if I could take them on the upper part of a mountain, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
[00:32:36]  Because you know what?
[00:32:37]  Whoever you think you are, strong, arrogant, smart, whatever, the real you becomes visible to everybody when you're on the steep part of a mountain making an ascent at high altitude, especially if you're up 18,000, 19,000 feet.
[00:32:52]  And even to you, you'll see who you really are.
[00:32:55]  That's well said.
[00:32:56]  So, Jim, can you just give us some other big picture points from this book as some takeaways, what students can take from it?
[00:33:05]  And I encourage everyone to check this out.
[00:33:08]  It's a great book.
[00:33:09]  I contributed to it, Selling in an Anxious World.
[00:33:12]  What parts did you want to touch on that we didn't get a chance to cover?
[00:33:16]  Well, Charlie, you know, I think we've hit the major points to this book.
[00:33:22]  The book will go into a lot more detail.
[00:33:25]  I think that we're in a new era now.
[00:33:28]  We have the ability, we have the tools, having classified culture in the way we've done it for companies, for senior executives to really see what the culture of their organization is to maximize productivity.
[00:33:40]  For people joining companies to see really what the personality of the company is and do I sit there?
[00:33:47]  Will it match what I believe is important values?
[00:33:50]  I also think that from a customer perspective, they will never be able to partner with a company that operates with a looking glass culture.
[00:33:59]  Will never happen.
[00:34:00]  Never, ever happen.
[00:34:02]  For young people joining companies, if they go into a looking glass culture, they're going to damage their career before it's even started.
[00:34:10]  So, you know, if there's one point I would make, it's make the invisible visible.
[00:34:19]  Most people in the world discount the intangible.
[00:34:23]  They always default to what they can feel, see, hear.
[00:34:27]  That's what they focus on.
[00:34:29]  But that's not where the opportunity is.
[00:34:31]  The opportunity is not only to see what other people haven't seen, but to be able to think differently about that which everybody sees and build competitive advantage if you're in sales, build career acceleration if you're joining a company.
[00:34:47]  And if you're a leadership, view culture as an executive as something that needs to be accretive to your shareholders as well as to your employees and your customers.
[00:34:59]  That's well put.
[00:35:00]  Everybody, it's selling in an anxious world.
[00:35:01]  Jim, thank you for joining the Charlie Kirk show and thanks for your friendship.
[00:35:05]  Everyone, check out this book and hope to see you soon, Jim.
[00:35:07]  Thank you.
[00:35:08]  Thank you, Charlie.
[00:35:09]  You bet.
[00:35:12]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:35:14]  Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:35:17]  And please consider supporting us at charliekirk.com slash support.
[00:35:21]  God bless.
[00:35:22]  Speak to you soon.