The content of this recording is copyrighted by Sandler Systems, LLC. All rights reserved.
This is the Building Blocks of Success with Glenn Mattson.
Glenn Mattson:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Building Blocks of Success. As we enter into Season 7, Episode 9. We're going to be taking a look at the bill of rights, the bill of rights for salespeople. And I want to share with you how impactful this was when I first got started in the business. When I first got started, I thought that everyone basically was superior to me in every form or fashion. If they asked a question, you had to answer it. If they blew me off, well, that was okay. They're a prospect and you're a salesperson. And they were always right. And it wasn't good to fail and all these things I had in my head. And when I actually heard Sandler go through some of this, what I'm going to share with you now, it really changed an awful lot about how I looked at success, how I looked at my role and how I looked at really a sales role.
And it's not the Willy Loman. The cigar smoking, polyester wearing, sleazy, all negative words, commissions, shark, pig, snake, liar, all that stuff that a lot of people have negative connotations towards when it comes to salespeople. You don't hear very many parents walking into a room saying, oh, hey, how you doing? Oh, I'm doing great. My kid's a sales kid. He's a salesperson. And everyone runs over and gives him a big hug and says, you must be so proud. Yet, most of those individuals will out-earn most of those other people's kids soon enough. But there is, for some reason, for some people, a negative connotation of sales and what sales means and if you're a good salesperson, what you are. Yet, I want to share with you, again, this bill of rights. It helped me tremendously, and I hope it can help you too.
The first one I want you to share with you is, the very first step is, you have the right... to your dreams, your desires, and your goals. Let me tell you this again. You have the right to your dreams, to your goals, and to your desires. No one can take away that from you at all.
That's not something that… it's yours. If you want to have something, if you want a certain desire, you have a certain goal that you want to achieve, you have the right to believe it and you have the right to go after it. If you have certain expectations in which you like to accomplish, you have the right to have those. I was always sometimes, even in my early years, I felt embarrassed by some of the things that I wanted. I felt embarrassed by some of the goals that I wanted. I felt like I was, you know, being a... almost rude by saying, Hey, I would love to earn X. I want that kind of house. I would love to have this kind of car I want. And just sitting there and coming from not much, all of a sudden you start to maybe say what I grew up in wasn't good enough. What I grew up in was awesome. What I grew up in is gave me the attitudes and the right mindset to do what I get to need to do. But I always felt a little uncomfortable dreaming big and having a desire to have more than. most of my friends ever thought they would have. And I was willing to work for it, but I always felt a little twinge of, hey, man, am I being that guy? Am I thinking outside my shoes? Am I doing something I should be doing or not doing?
Glenn Mattson:
So that was always hard… is dreaming big and feeling comfortable dreaming big until you hang out with people who think even bigger than you, right? But the first thing I want you to really have deep down inside is you cannot grow without proper, you're never going to grow or prosper without goals. Without dreams. Dreams are the basis of what goals come from. So your dreams are aspirations and things you want. Your goals are how I'm going to get there and I'm willing to fight like hell to get it. So your dreams become your goals. You have the right, no matter how far-fetched, how bizarre, how limitless, you have the right to dream. You have the right to have a desire and to have expectations of whatever you would like. So take that lid off your head. And never feel embarrassed or uncomfortable because you think bigger than your friends and you want more than a lot of your friends. Never, ever feel bad. That's your bill of rights.
The second one I want to share with you is you have the right to what you want. You're like, wait a minute, what does that mean? No, you just said two seconds ago. No, very different. The only boundary that we have of our capacity is to dream and think. That limit itself is inside of our head, meaning that we can only think or dream so big.
So you have the right to want what you want. Napoleon Hill, for instance. Think and Grow Rich; if you have not read it, you should. I understand it was written a long time ago and it'll tell you to save a penny per day and it'll accumulate. That's the same thing. You got to save money every single day. And Napoleon Hill, he wrote, and again, some of you may think this is a little weird philosophically or spiritually. But what the belief was is that if someone, however you deem that you got to planet earth, whatever your belief is and how you got here… so religious background, you believe that I got here through blank. I want you to share something with you is that the belief is that if your creator or whatever you want to say, put you here and gave you the ability to think and to conceive something in your mind like that, whatever it may be, then they also gave you the ability to get it. Because wouldn't that be the most ironic evil thing in the world was make you think about something you can't get.
So our ability to have the right to want what we want. So if you have in-laws, parents, friends, like, what do you want that for? Man, what's wrong? You have all the rights in the world to what you want. So that's number two. First is you have the right to your dreams, your desires, and your expectations. You also have the right to what you want.
Here's the third one. You have the right to like yourself as who you are. See, part of the massive head trash that we have is we compare ourselves to other people and we say, hey, they're doing better or they're over here. I haven't got done this yet, or I need to do this, or how come I didn't do that? Or I always do this. Oh, that's a big punch in the gut for your self-esteem. You always bump, bump, bump, bump, bump. Well, you have the right to like yourself as who you are. Trash and head trash is part of the human condition.
Glenn Mattson:
Every single one of us have psychological mumbo jumbo in between our ears and in our head and our heart. We all do. You know, liking ourselves a little more than just whimsical saying things about going to yoga and do reading your one-liners in the morning time and doing your affirmations and etc. It is absolutely critical to your self-esteem. So you have to have the ability to understand that who you are inside actually dictates who you’re going to be on the outside. The success on the outside doesn't dictate who you're going to be on the inside. So you have the right to like yourself. You have the right to be comfortable with who you are. You may not be where you want to be, but you still have the right to be comfortable. You have the right, when I say comfort, is to understand that you're in the process of change. You're going to mess up. You're going to drop the ball. You're going to have failure, but you’re moving through it, and that's okay. You're going to have the capacity for courage and confidence means you need to have self-esteem. And that's what I mean by like yourself as who you are.
Don't say to yourself, I'm not here yet because I have to do these three things. And therefore you beat yourself up constantly. Shoulda, coulda, woulda. You go to sleep. Last thing you think about is all the things you didn't do. You realize that's half the stuff that causes us not to sleep at night is undue to-dos. So have the right to like yourself as who you are. That's number three.
Number four. Some of you may say these are small nuances, a little left, a little right, but write them down. First one. The right to dream desires. Second is you have the right to what you want. Third is you have the right to like yourself as who you are. Stop beating yourself up. Stop absolutely being your worst nightmare. The fourth is you have the right to change. You have the right to change who you are. You have the right to change what you say, who you talk with. You have the right to do anything that you think is right to change.
Yet there are only a few people that will make that choice. They'll make the choices. I have the right to change. I don't need permission to change. And by the way, here comes the hard part. When you start to change all the people around you, you would think your friends, your coworkers, you think they would say, oh, that's fantastic. I love that. You're so special. Keep it up. Go for it, kid. Oh, you're on a diet. Great. Oh, you’re going to the gym. Fantastic. Oh, you're staying late so you can make more money. Oh, great. But they don't do that. What they do is they look at themselves and say, wait a minute, you're staying later to work harder so that you can pay the fare of me and get to where you want to be sooner? You're not going to leave in the elevator with me? And then they look at your goals, quite honestly, as what they're not doing. And that's when they typically take pot shots.
So sometimes you have to realize, and I hate to say this to you, and I do it all the time for my private coaching clients, and I say it a lot to people that are starting in their professional careers, you're going to lose friends. And you're going to lose friends because some of your friends aren't looking for you to be successful. They're looking for you to stay who you are.
Because when you become successful, for some with lower self-esteem, it reflects on themselves saying, look what you're not doing. So you are becoming what they maybe would want to be, but they don't have the fortitude to do it. So they take potshots at you. They say one-liners that hurt sometimes. They're meant to be a dig, even though they don't come out that way. That's because you're changing and they're not. You don't need excuses. You don't need to cover up failures at all.
Glenn Mattson:
That leads me to the fifth one. So yes, you have the right to change. You have the right to choose if you like the life you're in or you want to change. You don't have to defend it. You have the right. The fifth one, which I think a lot of people don't get, is you have the right to fail. You really do. You have the right to get up, to practice it, do the best you can, and then see what happens. That's failure. You're never going to be successful if you don't fail. Failure is what gives us the identification of what we need to do better next time, i.e. failure is what drives lessons. So I think a lot of people, when they have to get into their stretch zone, they run from it because they don't feel like they have the right to fail. Absolutely you do. There's zero reasons that you need to make excuses for attempts and for failures. Zero. Why would you ever make an excuse on why you failed? Don’t. Don't make excuses. Don't cover it up. Don't say it was a bad prospect. It wasn't good timing. You never should have brought it up. To think that you can be successful without having to fail is absurd.
But we have to admit to ourselves, it is part of the absolute experience and we have to be open to it. To learn from failure is the most important thing you're going to have in your professional career over time. Having the ability to live in a stretch zone is what gives us that ability to fail. I don't want you to feel bad about it. I don't want you to run into the coffee room and have to have three cups of coffee and talk to someone for three hours because you didn't have a good call. Know how you failed. Take a look at it and say, next time, do I need more prep work? Do I need to prepare? Do I actually need to spend time making sure I have my P's and Q's in order? Which by the way, most people do. You got to stop winging it. So you have the right to fail. And that's very important. And with that, I want to make sure that when you go home and you feel bad because you failed that day, never in a million years… as a salesperson, the bill of rights, number five, is you have the right to fail. Don't ever feel bad about failure. Learn from it, let it go, and move on. Period. We have the right to fail. Don’t feel bad about it.
The sixth one is you have the right to be imperfect. I know this sounds crazy, right? Glenn, what are you doing with these bill of rights? What's going on here? You have the right to be imperfect? What does that mean? You know how many of us stress ourselves out that we have to say it absolutely perfect every single time, or we demand absolute perfection from everybody? Being imperfect is okay. Not knowing everything you're supposed to say every single time is normal. So you have the right to be imperfect. We all are imperfect on some certain level for sure. As much as I think I'm pretty good, I'm told constantly I have gaps for sure, right? So we all have imperfections.
Glenn Mattson:
So the reason I'm bringing up imperfection is because a fair amount of people feel very uncomfortable. They feel tarnished. They feel like a kink in the armor if they're not perfect every single time. And we know in the Sandler sales process, the okay, not okay theory is incredibly important. And being imperfect in a sales call, sometimes you're being human. Sometimes, quite honestly, it's a great move to lower the defense mechanisms. But regardless if it's on purpose or not, you have the right to not be perfect every single time.
Yesterday, I got off a call with a client of mine. 45 minutes I heard was back and forth about, I can't believe I didn't do it right. So much on the case for this one. We needed this one to be run into all the reasons why. Then the excuses started to come and it all came from as I can't believe I didn't do it right. You have the right to drop the ball. Just don't do it that often, but you can't kill yourself for it. If you're prepared and you did everything you were supposed to do and you weren't perfect, Got it. Now, if you didn't prepare and you were imperfect, then you got to learn how to do prep work. But you have the right to be imperfect. That's a big one for a lot of people. Number seven.
Number seven of the bill of rights for salespeople. You have the right to choose. Choice is supposed to be an inherent right of all citizens. So you have the right to choose who you want to work with. You have the right to choose to stay with that prospect and continue the conversations. You have the right to choose to answer the question or ask them a reverse. You have the right to choose where to spend your time and who to spend your time with. You have the right to choose if you want to pursue a case or not a case. You have the right to choose if you want to plant your feet and ask the hard questions. So one of the things that's really important is you do have the right to choose. Choose your path, choose your direction. That's your choice. But you also have to realize if you own your choice, you also have to own the outcomes, which is also part of the bill of rights.
So, so far, we've gotten seven done. The bill of rights are about you have the right to dreams and goals and your expectations of yourself. You have the right to what you want is number two. The third right is you have the right to like yourself as who you are, not constantly trying to make yourself bigger or better than where you are right now. You got to accept where you are and understand that you're in a growth pattern. Number four is you have the right to change. Number five is you have the right to fail. Six is you have the right to be imperfect. Seven is you have the right to choose.
Next three are juicy. You have the right to ask. You got to expect some rejection with this. It's going to help you grow. Never beg, ever. You ask and keep asking. Look, you're going to impact your clients more and ironically enough, making more income is based on the amount of questions you ask, not the information you give. Let me tell that to you again. The more questions you ask, the more money you're going to make. The more questions you ask, the better you're going to be for your clients. The more questions you ask, the more you can help your clients not get stuck or hit pitfalls or etc. So you have the right to ask. You have the right to ask the questions that you want. You just got to make sure you do in the right way. There's going to be some people that may not want to answer them, but you have the right to ask.
So when you're taking a look at it, you're going to make sure that you understand, especially in qualifications, a lot of people feel uncomfortable. They're being pushy. They feel uncomfortable asking a lot of questions. They feel uncomfortable. Oh, I'm sorry. Do you mind if I ask a question? You got to ask questions, man. 70% of your sales call is listening, not you talking. That means for 70% of the time, you better be really good at asking questions to make sure that your prospect or client or suspect is talking.
Discovery isn't about you talking. Discovery is about them talking and you asking the right questions. The ability to be an answer provider is one of the biggest crutches in your ability to grow as a salesperson. To think that if someone asks you a question, you have to answer it right away. To think that if someone... something up and says, oh, that looks good that you run with it. Those are statements. When people ask you questions, 99% of the time, we know all this. They're not looking for an answer to the question. They're asking because people never ask the real question. So we always have to ask questions to get clarification. We call it reversing. But there's two parts of asking questions. One part is what questions do you ask? The second is how do you handle questions that are being asked of you? Two different things. Both need to fall under you have the right to ask. Remember, answering questions is reversing. Learning how to ask the art of asking questions is very powerful and needed. So that's number eight. You have the right to ask.
Glenn Mattson:
Number nine on the salesperson's bill of rights. Oh man, this one helped me out a lot. You have the right to choose how you spend your time and your energy. You have the right to decide where to spend your time and your energy. Man, this is 100%. You can decide. Now, you may make all the wrong decisions on that area, but you have the right to decide how you're going to spend your time, how you're going to use your energy and your effort. So if you choose to go to the car wash and sit there and then come back and look on your CRM for four hours… that's how you want to spend your time? You have the right to do that. You want to procrastinate all day long? That's your choice.
You all know what's going to happen, but that's your choice. If you want to decide to spend your time after the kids go to sleep to watch TV, that's your choice. If you want to sit down after the kids go to bed and practice your skill and practice and get better at your craft so you own it, so you don't have to think about it, that's your choice. But here's something you got to realize about choices. If you're big enough to make the choice, you got to be big enough to live with the consequences. So you have the right to decide how you use your time and use your energy. Don't be told. You have the right. But you also have to realize the very beginning, you got to pay the ferryman. So make sure that how you use your time and energy makes sense to your goals and your plan. Don't make excuses on what's not happening because of time and energy.
Time is never the reason we're not successful. It is the reason that not successful people use, but it's not the reason that we're not successful. Everybody has exactly the same amount of time in the day as everybody else. The question is, what decisions do you do with the time that you have? What decisions are you making in the time that you have? What decisions did you make that impact the time that you have? That's the problem. It's not time management. It's selection of your decisions. So you have the right to decide how you use and spend your time, but man. You got to own the consequences and don't make excuses then. You want to go home at two o'clock and not make your phone calls? Don't complain. Two weeks from now, you're not making any money or you don't have any appointments. That outcome is because you decided to go home, but you have the right to do that. So own it.
So here comes your next one. Last one. I kind of like this one. It's up on my wall, quite honestly. Salesperson's bill of rights, number 10. You have the right to lunch. You have the right to have a bite to eat. You have the right to have lunch once you've paid the price. What I mean by that is there ain't no free lunch in life. You want to accomplish something. You want to get something. You have to pay the ferryman to get it. So you absolutely have the right for lunch. You have the right to whatever you want. You have the right for that vacation. You have the right for that house. You have the right for that car. You have the right for getting out of debt. That's what it means. It means you have the right to lunch. You just have to earn it. There is no free lunch. Which means if you want the reward, you got to put the energy and effort in to get the reward.
Just don't give yourself a reward. How can you sit in your office all day and move your prospecting cards from the left side of your desk to the right side of your desk, then spend two hours in your CRM, then spend another hour and a half cleaning up what your drip marketing is going to sound like, and all of a sudden, ooh, it's time for lunch. You haven't done a darn thing yet. That's paid time activities. You're hiding, is what you're doing. So you do have the right to lunch. But I want you to make sure that you own, you realize you have to pay the price. When I say, Hey, there ain't no free lunch. Do you have to, you're allowed to have lunch. You're allowed to go out and take your time if you want to and leave the office and give yourself a break. Absolutely. But you got to earn it. How can you sit in the office and four hours do, you know, four hours worth of no pay time activities and then turn around and say, I'm exhausted. I got to go with something to eat. So earn those small rewards. So you absolutely have the right to reward yourself. You just have to earn it, right? You're driving down the street. You want yourself, you want to get a new pair of shoes, fine. You want to get a new racket for pickleball, I could care less, whatever the goals are, fine.
Glenn Mattson:
Instead of buying it, say, you know what? After I make X amount of dials, after I do this, I'll go… because you got to give yourself rewards and systems. Just don't get yourself because you want it. Earn it is what it means. And you want to make the interpretation of free lunch and the right to eat and all that stuff. No, I'm saying to you is that if you want something, you got to earn it. There’s no freebies. And don't buy stuff just to make yourself feel better. You haven't earned it yet. So that's what I mean by you have to have the right to lunch. You have the right to lunch. You just got to earn it.
So when you look at the building blocks, the bill of rights for salespeople, let's run through them real quick. Number one, you have the right to dream, desire and have expectations of yourself. Don't ever feel bad about it. You have the right to want what you want. No one can tell you what's possible. Parents, friends, in-laws, never. You have the right to like yourself as who you are. Stop thinking about a year or two years from now, or if some of you are a career changer, stop thinking about where you were three years ago.
Wherever you are right now, you put yourself there. If you're not happy, move. but you got to make sure that you have the right to like yourself and not feel bad because other people think other things. Number four, you have the right to change. Number five, you have the right to fail. Number six, you have the right to be imperfect. Number seven is you have the right to choose. Number eight is you have the right to ask. Nine, if you have the right t decide how you use your time and your energy, you decide. Number 10. You have the right to lunch. You just have to earn it once you've paid the price. So hopefully these bill of rights gives you the availability, understanding that it's our choice to be where we are. It's our choice not to be where we are. If you're a salesperson, don't think just because you wear a hat that says salesperson, you have no rights. You have lots of them.
You are responsible for your actions. You're responsible for your failures and you're responsible for your own decisions. If we learn to perform them effectively and learn from them, we earn the right to prosper. If we do not prosper, we have the right to try again and again and again. We are in command of our own destiny and we earn the fruits of our efforts. We are responsible for us. So next time you're sitting in front of someone and you're feeling pressure, remember, you have a bill of rights too.
I hope you enjoyed this version of Building Blocks of Success. Love your impact, input, people sharing, some lessons learned from it. Feel free to reach out and keep them coming. This is your bill of rights and I hope it helps. Enjoy yourself. Look forward to the next Building Blocks of Success.
This is the Building Blocks of Success with Glenn Mattson.
