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Glenn Mattson
This is the Building Blocks of Success with Glenn Mattson.
Glenn Mattson:
Hey, everybody. Season six, episode nine. Today, we're going to be taking a look at lessons learned of 2025.
Coming to a year end, and I'm sure many of you are looking ahead and looking behind. As you look behind, you're saying to yourself, “shoulda, coulda, woulda or thank goodness I did, or patting yourself on the back for the wins.
So right now, I find really they have two camps. You're either ahead of the game, you're winning, or you're chasing. And what that means is that you're doing the behavior that you were supposed to be doing throughout the year. Now you're trying to cram into the end of the year. Yep.That's right.
So let's take a look at what are some of the things that I have seen in 33 years of training over 250,000 people? What are some of the common things that I find happening about now? And more importantly is why?
So as you listen in, you may find yourself shaking your head saying, yeah, that's me. Or hopefully you may be shaking your head saying that was me and not anymore. So let's have a chat on this.
Glenn Mattson:
So first thing is, I would tell you that when I look at individuals that say they wanted to earn X and they are currently year to date at Y and Y, by the way, is not on the right run rate to get to where they want to go. So let's go through some of the reasons, some of the things that I hear or some of the things I'd love for you to not forget. So you don't get there.
First one is this all goals, all results, goals, all objectives, financial, personal business doesn't make a difference. All goals must be broken down to daily behaviors. See, behavior is the only thing that you can control. We can influence our outcomes. We can't control it. What we can control is what we choose to do or not to do to get ourselves towards that outcome. So your goals have to be broken down to daily behaviors.
If you want to lose weight, for instance, you have to have a daily behavior of your intake. You have to have a daily behavior of what you're going to do from a walking or an exercise standpoint. So you can burn more calories you're taking in. You can't just decide one day I'm going to lose weight and start drinking water. It's not the way it works.
So you have to convert it down to daily behaviors. That's number one. Most people don't do that. Most people, they have what's called KPIs. And a KPI is a fancy word for what are we tracking, called key performance indicators. And sometimes we have what's called leading and lagging indicators. Your leading indicators are typically behavior-based. And your lagging indicators are typically results-based. So some of you out there may have results based on how many deals you need to do or how many fact finders you need to have or how many cases or upsells and tonnage you need to do. That's results.
But you have to break those results into behaviors because that's the only thing you can control.
Glenn Mattson:
So number one is I see an awful lot of individuals that have goals that are very results based, yet they have no behaviors connected to those. So they don't understand what they need to do to get there or how far off they are when they're not there.
So many people will turn around and say, I got to make up an extra X amount of dollars, yet they still don't understand the behavior they have to do to get there.
Number two, this drives me batty. People will have objectives and they will put a plan together and then they debate with themselves during the process of fulfilling the plan if they want the object again. It's like saying to yourself, I want X. This is what I have to do to get there. And within a month of trying to get there, you're saying, I don't really know if I want X.
What drives me crazy is people will put together a cookbook or a behavioral plan, and then they use words like, I'll try. Let's see what happens. Let's give it a shot and see where we land. That's not how it works.
Glenn Mattson:
When you have a goal and you put a plan together to get the goal, the second step you have to take a look at is, are you committed to the behavior? Are you committed to what you have to do on a daily basis? If the answer is no, then you've got to change the plan. If you're nervous about it, that's what I would expect, right? Getting outside your comfort zone. But you have to make a commitment to yourself that you're going to do the behavior what the plan calls for. If you're not going to do the behavior, why the heck would you start on the destination? So first is all goals have to be converted.
Second is, man, you got to have a commitment to the daily behaviors. For instance, here's one I can ask all of you listening in. Do you use the snooze button? First thing when you wake up in the morning, are you truly committed to getting up at the time you're supposed to? Or do you hit the snooze button and then hit it again? Your first victory of the day, your first choice to wimp out or not wimp out every day is your snooze button. So start the day with commitment. Get up when you're supposed to. Don't get up when your snooze goes off the third time.
Now that kind of leads me to my third lesson I want to share with everybody. No disrespect to anyone. It's mostly the younger generation that I hear this from, but it doesn't mean it's not with the older generation. When people have a plan of what they need to do, I hear an awful lot, I don't feel like it today. I don't feel like I can do that. I'm just not in the mood for that activity.
Glenn Mattson:
I just shake my head and say, I don't understand what the hell you're talking about. You got to stop doing what you feel like. You have to start learning to do what your plan calls for, especially if it's negative feelings. I don't feel good today. I'm not going to make my calls. No, that's even more of a reason you have to make your calls. So whenever you want to stop doing something because of the way you feel, to me, that's a 100% of a test that you have to do what you're supposed to do, even if you don't want to do it even more so now than before. So please stop with the, I don't feel it, or I'm not in the mood.
Remember something very important. Action breaks paralysis. Action breaks bad mindset. So if you ain't feeling anything, you're not in the mood, the only way to get in the mood is by doing something towards the action of what you're supposed to be doing, i.e. do the job.
Glenn Mattson:
Fourth one I want to share with everybody is do a little bit all the time, not a lot some of the time. Do a little bit all the time, not a lot some of the time. The best, most successful entrepreneurs have a prospecting antenna that's up all the time. They prospect and shake the trees all the time. How many of you only prospect when you have to? You get really busy. Then you find yourself dealing with all the cases and getting the proposals out the door. And because of that, you're not actually prospecting. Then all of a sudden, your pipeline starts to go down. It gets dried up. You're like, oh my gosh, you got to get back to work. You start prospecting. You start getting a full pipeline. All of a sudden, you come up with another excuse that you can't keep prospecting because you’re dealing with all the stuff in your pipeline. No, it's not an or. You live in the world of and. You got to do all of it, which is why you got to do a little prospecting every single day.
Next one I want to share with you. It's a mindset team.
Glenn Mattson:
It's a mindset that will absolutely create the fear or the outcome that you're afraid of. Let me tell you what I mean. I always hear it from someone who has an opportunity or a piece of business or a prospect. That's a bit outside their comfort zone. Now, when I say a bit outside your comfort zone, I'm not saying that your average case size is maybe 10,000 and this is 12,000. I'm talking about it double what you're normally accustomed to or even more. And your mindset is, man, I'm afraid to lose this piece of business. Drives me crazy. Why are you afraid of losing something you don't even have yet? All you have is the opportunity to say hello. So when you're afraid of losing a piece of business, think about this. How often are you right now, listening right now, thinking about between now and the end of the year, like, I'm afraid to lose that piece of business. I'm going to tell you this flat out. The surest way to lose the business is act like you're afraid to lose the business. When you don't act like you're afraid, you will win more often.
It's always interesting. Someone will call in, I'd say a lot towards the end of the year, and this will pop up all the time. Glenn, I'm afraid to lose this. I'm afraid to lose this. I don't know what to say. I'm afraid to lose this. Oh, I can't say that. I'm afraid to lose. The things you're afraid to say are most likely the things you need to say to win. Let me say that to you again. The things that you're most likely afraid to ask or say are most likely the things you need to say or do to win it.
Glenn Mattson:
So here's the tip that you can take a look at. What happens if you take a zero off the size of the commission or the size of the deal? Just for straight math, let's suppose your commission was going to be 5,000 bucks. And that is an absolute boatload of money to you. It makes your head wiggle waggle. Well, let's suppose instead of asking what would I do to win a $5,000 case, what would I do to win a $500 case? So if the deal that you're working on lost is zero, then what? I just did this with my friend the other day who was in IT and it was a $3 million account and his quota is 7 million. So it was literally almost half of his quota. And he's terrified. Oh, Glenn, I can't lose this. Like, listen, let's get in the same playing field. You have nothing to lose right now. Yeah, but I have an opportunity. Yes, but that's different than losing. You don't have anything to lose.
And when I said to him, I said, let me ask you a quick question. Without us going to the cast of characters and who's involved and where we are in the presentation and all that fun stuff, let me ask you a quick question. If you are where you are right now, but this was not a $3 million deal, but it was 300 grand. So I think you would call those level C opportunities, not A and A pluses. It was 300 grand. What would you do? And it was shocking. He came up with five very solid strategies and what he would do to turn this thing around. They were solid. I would say this to this person. I would ask this person this information. We would move this over there. I mean, it was really good strategies. I turned to him and said, okay, well, what's the difference? And he looked at me like I was a ding dong. He goes, what are you talking about? It's not 300 grand. It's 3 million. I said, I got it.
Glenn Mattson:
But what's the difference in terms of the strategy besides the fact that you're afraid before you weren't afraid at 300,000. As a matter of fact, I could see it right from your eyes. You were a bit irritated. So why would you have to qualify them differently for 300, but you're afraid to ask those same questions at 3 million? It's not because a strategy doesn't work. It's because you are afraid. And that's when you have to ask it even more so. That's why some of us bring in joint work partners. We ask other people to help. You know, why we ask them to help is, hey, half is better than nothing, especially if I have to split the commission. But you know what's different? Because I hear it from them all the time. After the sales call, they go, he didn't do anything, anything different than I would have. She said the same questions I would have said. What they realized was the strategy and tactics were most likely the same. The equal business stature is what was different. The tone, the pitch, the angle, the confidence that came from the senior producer is what happened, not your confidence or lack of.
Glenn Mattson:
So ask yourself, when you bring in joint work partners, is that because they know more or have they been to that situation more often? So therefore they're more comfortable being on the field. Comfort is way different than strategies and tactics and product knowledge. Comfort is attitude. Comfort is your outlook. So stop being afraid of losing something you do not have.
Next one I want to share with you, I was going to turn this into an entire podcast, and I still may. One of the things I'd like to share with you is that I find it interesting when we talk with people and they say things like, I don't want to be a salesperson. I don't want to sound salesy. Salespeople are pushy. Salespeople sell product. Salespeople don't listen. Salespeople are just for the commission. Salespeople are not for me, they're for themselves. The polyester, cigar smoking, back slapping, all that fun stuff. So many people don't want to be that person.
Yet, when we have conversations with them about the Sandler strategy, where it's mutually beneficial, mutually agreed upon, truly figuring out what the problem is, then discovering what the reason and the impact, and finally asking if they want to commit to solving it before you provide a solution. It's exceedingly we-based.
Glenn Mattson:
I always find it interesting that when we start talking about how to set up an agenda, for instance, an agenda that is mutually beneficial for both parties, or how to have a conversation about what their concerns are or their problems, and then discovering if those problems are strong enough, big enough tomorrow that they would like to change it, and then providing your solution. Somehow they think showing product, talking about the features and benefits of the product telling people why they should buy from them. Literally in the first five minutes, let me tell you why people buy from us, right? This is why they use us. This is what you do. Here's the five pillars of financial planning, et cetera. And all we're doing is pushing the reasons why they should buy from you. Yet we never really uncover the reasons of what they were trying to solve.
So it just baffles me that people that don't want to be in sales All they do is look and sound like a salesperson. Oh, I don't want to be pushy. So all you do is push features and benefits, but you don't ask any discovery questions. They don't want to be salesy by uncovering what the problems are. So they would go right to the solutions. You've got to look at who you are and what you're doing. You've got to look at it in the eyes of the prospect. You're showing up in a Zoom or at my house or at my place of business. And you're going to walk in and do a nice introduction. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. But you're going to jump right into why should I buy from you? What you can do to help me. I mean, the audacity for you to tell me your value prop without actually knowing who I am and what my issues are.
The more people tell me they don't want to be like salespeople, the more they act like salespeople. Glenn, I don't really want to know the truth before I do a proposal. That makes me uncomfortable. Okay.
Glenn Mattson:
Well, don't find out what's going to happen, after the proposal beforehand, go do all the work, do the proposal, follow up with them and be hit from and ghosted and then sit back and scratch your head and try to figure out how come. There are ways to never sound like a salesperson or be perceived as a salesperson. That's what makes Sandler so infamously good. But it's confusing to me when people are not in the mood or don't want to ask discovery questions, qualify people, and really figure out if it's mutually beneficial for the two of you to work together or even get to a proposal.
The more that people tell me they don't want to sound salesy, the more they act salesy. The more you push a product to someone, even if they want to buy it, the more they're going to push it away from you. So when we look at this, I would have you ask yourself, are you exactly what you don't want yourself to be? Are you exactly what you're trying to say that you are trying not to be? Because I got to be honest with you, most of the places I go to, when people say, I don't want to be a sales guy or a salesperson, I don't want to sound like a salesperson. If you find out what they do, they are so cliche of what a salesperson is. It's shocking.
So I guess the lesson on this one is when do you want to find pain? Do you want to have the uncomfortabilities during the meeting when you're uncovering the truth? Or do you want to have the uncomfortability of being ghosted and sitting there scratching your head, trying to figure out how come you had a great meeting with someone and now it's cold?
Glenn Mattson:
So as you look at the end of your year, ask yourself, did I have goals broken down to daily behaviors? Were I committed to those daily behaviors? Did I let my emotions dictate what I did or didn't do with actions? Was I doing a lot and then nothing and then a lot and nothing? Was I acting in a manner that I was afraid of losing something I didn't even have yet?
So next year, think about, have purpose. Be committed to your plan. Don't worry about how you feel. Do what the plan calls for. You will go home more satisfied by doing what you're supposed to do, not what you wanted to do.
Remember the old saying, your goals and your plans are the big elephant. You just got to eat it piece by piece, right? You can't have it one big goal, piece by piece by piece. And stop worrying about the negative outcomes that never happened or haven't happened up to this point.
As you start looking forward to 2026, learn from your blind spots of 2025. Look forward to great journeys moving forward.
This is the Building Blocks of Success with Glenn Mattson.
