Glenn Mattson
The content of this recording is copyrighted by Sandler Systems LLC. All rights reserved.
Glenn Mattson
Hey everybody, welcome back. We're at season six, episode one. Today, we're going to be taking a look at thriving without excuses. Listen, I've been doing this for 30 years. I’ve trained well over 200,000 salespeople, worked with over 15,000 entrepreneurs at very many different levels. When you look and talk to individuals who lead others, manage others, coach others, or have to drive execution on their own, I will tell you across the board, there is one unilateral thing that I find that it's one of the biggest vampires that I have seen inside of an organization, inside of a team, and especially inside of individuals. That vampire that I’m talking about today is really, excuse-making. It absolutely will suck the life right out of a company, out of a team, out of an individual. It will crush the growth, it will erode the culture, and it has a massive impact on return on investment. So, I want to take a journey today and walk you through what excuse-making is, how it happens, and how to, in some respects, fix it.
Glenn Mattson
So, the first thing we have to do is get a baseline. We’ve got to get an understanding that baseline, that making excuses, is really by intent, avoiding and removing blame. You don't want to have any of the issues standing on your plate, so you avoid blame. You also free yourself from accountability. Now, here's part of the issue. When we look at a successful mindset, successful mindsets are those that have accountability, responsibility, and ownership. It really depends on where they are within the predicament, right? So, before you get into something, that's responsibility. If you're in the midst of it and it's going, you know, haywire or left or right, it's not going well, that's ownership - you're in the midst of it. If it's after the fact, and you are looking over your shoulder, that's called accountability. But the mindset, the successful mindset, is exactly the same.
Glenn Mattson
So, when we take a look at excuse making, it avoids or eliminates the successful mindset. It doesn't take responsibility, it doesn't take ownership, it doesn't take accountability. As a matter of fact, if you look at where growth happens, growth happens from being outside of our comfort zone. So, if you want to have the capacity to grow, if you want to be at the capacity to increase your competencies, expand your mindset, you have to be pushing the envelope of your comfort zone. If you don't own what you do or don't do, it's very difficult, almost impossible to actually learn and to change. So, by freeing yourself from accountability or avoiding blame, what we're really doing is we're saying to ourselves that I'm okay where I am. I don't want to change. It wasn't me. There's nothing I could do to make that situation better, i.e.: I don't have to learn anything.
Glenn Mattson
Well, we also have to take a look at excuse making, which is really interesting in that most excuse makers, I always found this to be an intriguing little gem, that most excuse makers tend not to make one excuse. They have a tendency to make them all the time. They make them in their personal life. They make them for not showing up on time. They make them for why they feel tired, or whatever it may be. Once they start making excuses and they find out that the average person will accept them, they keep making them.
Glenn Mattson
If you're at work or if you have people reporting to you, if someone makes an excuse and you accept it, then they keep coming back. Heck, I even have a client of mine who's a sales manager, actually, he's an owner, and in the hat that we're talking about, he's managing his team, and he has made one of his salespeople become kind of a mentor slash manager. They meet every Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, 8:00 to 8:30, and they meet in the office. Now, this individual, before, when he was in straight sales, he didn't have to come in until nine. Well, at the third meeting of him being promoted upstream, he shows up late. Literally two sessions later, he shows up late again. Now my client pulls him aside and goes, “Look, I just want to give you a heads up. This is how people see you when you don't show up on time. You're devaluing their time,” and he goes on down the list. Reality is, two sessions later, he did it again. So, what you have to realize is that we set a precedent when we accept excuses, and it's called a negative behavioral pattern.
Glenn Mattson
A negative behavioral pattern means that someone does something negative in a relatively short time period, but they do it three times, right? So, they do something negative. It happens three times in a short time period. It will recur over and over again if you don't nip it in the bud. When we look at excuse making as we take this journey today, realize it's you're trying to be Teflon. You don't want it to stick to you. You don't want accountability, the responsibility of what happened or didn't happen, and you have a tendency to, once you start to make excuses, make them over and over again.
Glenn Mattson
What are excuses? If we just sit there, and I'm sure you have a bunch in your head that's popping around that either your people used on you, or with you, or against you, and some of you listening in, have excuses that you use yourself also, right? I had to put out a fire. I had too many return phone calls to make. Life just got busy. Hey, I ran out of people to call. There are just too many distractions. I got bogged down with emails, training, meetings, right? We had changes in the RFP, so we had to do some edits to the proposal, or we had to do some edits to the presentation. We can go on and on and on and on.
Glenn Mattson
Now, in the past, you know me, I'm a big proponent of the success triangle. When we look at the success triangle, we have attitude, behavior, and technique. When we look at the technique side, that's the tactics and strategies. There are two words I want you to think about. That's knowing versus owning. Knowing what to say is cognitively understanding what you should be doing. Knowing what to say means that after a sales call or after a meeting or after a coaching session, you're like, oh man, I should have said this, or why didn't I say that? That's knowing. Owning means that you're on autopilot. You've done it enough that you own the tactic. You don't have to think about the tactic, it's on autopilot. The gap between knowing and owning, by the way, is significant in cost of money. But the gap between knowing and owning is where a lot of excuses happen.
Glenn Mattson
If you look at the behavior side, that's goals, plans, and action steps, right? Goals, long-term, short-term, you've got your plan, what you're going to do, and how you're going to do it. Then you have your action steps. Your action steps are about discipline, guts, and vitality. You know where a ton of excuses occur? In the action steps. Then we look at attitude. Attitude has to do with self-limiting beliefs and empowering beliefs. Self-limiting beliefs are our negative thoughts. We have two different sides, left and right. When your belief system has an adverse impact on your ability to either say or do what you're supposed to do in the technique side or follow through with the action steps of the plan on the behavior side, if your self-limiting beliefs are holding you back or pushing you towards not doing it, that's where excuses occur.
Glenn Mattson
So, there are a lot of excuses that show up in the success triangle. Now, you also know that we're huge on the development diamond, and the development diamond looks just like a diamond. If you know adult learning, adult learning is all about four sequential steps. You have to be aware. Then once you're aware, you have to gain knowledge. Once you gain the knowledge, you have to use the knowledge over time correctly in real-world environments, then it’ll get you to the third step, which is application. If you do that over time, you should have a skill set. So, it's awareness, knowledge, application, and skill. The diamond to us, when I look at it, is the upper left is awareness, and the upper right is knowledge. So, the question is, I just don't know, right? I don't know. Well, that's a lack of awareness, and they don't have direction. The other is that I don't know how to. That’s building competencies; that's a lack of knowledge. So, if you're not sure what the heck to do, or you're not sure what to do when it's time to do it, that's a training problem. You have to realize that's an awareness and knowledge problem.
Glenn Mattson
Now, if you know what to do, but you don't want to do it, that's a lack of desire, a lack of motivation. If you know what to do and how to do it, but you can't do it because you're afraid, that's a bravery issue. So, realize lack of desire and bravery issues are where an enormous amount of excuses occur. Now the crazy thing is, for all of you listening in that have any level of leadership within your hat that you have to wear, or you own your own business, or your et cetera, I want you to realize something really, really fast. First thing is, is that 82% of all leaders 82% walking out there, walking the planet Earth, right? Those individuals will flat out say they have limited to no ability to hold other people accountable. Limited or no ability, meaning that they're choosing not to hold people accountable. 82% of founders, leaders, and managers choose not to hold the people accountable. Yet, if you look at the top developmental needs of firms and inside of companies, regardless of size, by the way, one of the top leadership development needs is effectively holding others accountable. 91% of companies will say that.
Glenn Mattson
So, team, think about this. You put a hundred people in a room. Their job is to help people become the best version of themselves. Their job is to make sure people are doing what they should be doing, when they should be doing it, and how they should be doing it. 82% of them choose not to hold people accountable. That's staggering. Now here comes another scarier statistic in the opposite direction. If you look at all the people in the room. All of them. 85% of your employees, 85% of the people that report to you, 85% of the people that are on your team, want clarity. They want to know if they're doing it well. They want to know if they're not doing it well.
Glenn Mattson
Listen, 70% of them want to feel like they're living up to their potential. No one wants to go home feeling like a loser or a jerk or a wimp. So, this whole façade that when we get invited into companies and people say, “Glenn, we need to have a conversation about our pipeline, or we need to have a conversation about the lack of their activities.” They start going through how their team is not doing what they should be doing, when they should be doing it. No one ever points to leaders and says, “My leaders aren't holding the people accountable.” It's always, they're not doing it.
Glenn Mattson
I want to share with you that the majority of people walking into your business or through your office want courage and confidence. My problem is with you if you're a leader. The majority of them don't hold their people accountable, and they point the finger at others. So that brings me to a little topic called the shadow of its leader. I could do a whole series on just that term. But shadow of its leader means this; a leader, and I don't care if it's of a three person team or a leader of 300, 400, 600 people below you, it doesn't make a difference to me or thousands, the shadow of its leader means the team can only be as strong, the team can only be as strong as the shadow of its leader.
Glenn Mattson
So, think about people in your past. Think about people that you had who were great leaders. They cast a great shadow when risk, roadblocks, failures, stress, and excuses occurred. When those occur, how do they handle it? Because here's the reality for all of you out there who are managers and leaders, your team listens to what you tell them to do with literally one ear, but they watch everything that you do with two sets of eyes. So, the shadow of its leader means this. If you make excuses and you own a business, if you make excuses and you have people report to you, if you make excuses in your management, I will bet you an insane amount of money that you accept them from your people. Human nature will often state that if you do, you will accept. If you're someone who buys at the lowest price, if you're someone who needs to educate themselves before you make a major purchase, guess what? You're going to be selling at the lowest price. You're going to be selling a lot of information to people so they can make a decision. You sell the way you buy. That's what it means by a shadow of its leader. So, think about the great leaders you had in your time. How were they when it came to risks, roadblocks, failures, and, for today's topic, excuse making? So, the shadow of its leaders, it’s huge.
Glenn Mattson
So, if you're in a role of leadership, you have to ask yourself, are you casting a big shadow? Are you casting a small shadow? Because sometimes we overcomplicate this. The reality is, is that all sales problems happen for one of two reasons, and that's really it. Call me, email me, text me, right? You want to fight me on this later, but the reality is that all sales problems happen because you did, or you said something that you were not supposed to. Let me give that to you again. You said or did something you were not supposed to. Or you didn't do, or you did not say something you were supposed to.
Glenn Mattson
Let me give these to you again, so you can write them down. You should have it inside your office. You should have it right around your laptop, right around your screen, on little Post-it notes. It should be on your desk underneath your blotter. Hell, it should be right across the room from you on your dry erase board. Two reasons, and this is it. You said, or you did something that you were not supposed to. That's number one. Number two, you didn't do or you didn't say something you were supposed to. That's it.
Glenn Mattson
Now we start taking a look at all these excuses that people give. I'm going to tell you that most will say that excuses fall into a handful of buckets. Let me share two of them with you right now. And, by the way, I hate both of them. The first one, which drives me nuts, is time. It's the absolute worst one. It's the most common one. I couldn't get to it because I didn't have enough time. Man, there are 24 hours in a day. You can't play with that. You can't mess with it. You can't change it, no matter who the hell you are. You know the old saying, if you want something done, you give it to a busy person? Why? A busy person knows how to prioritize, and a busy person knows how to get stuff done. How come you get twice as much stuff done the day before you go on vacation as you did the whole week before? It's because you know you have no tomorrow, so you get stuff done. We have to realize, and this is really important for those listening in, that whatever you choose to do or not to do, whatever you decide to spend your time, energy, and effort on, it's a choice. It's a choice. So, you have to own the decision. You have to own the decision that you chose to spend your time doing this.
Glenn Mattson
You also have to own the outcome of that decision. The other piece you have to own is the impact. So, think about it. Own the decision that was your choice. Own the outcome of that because of that X, and then what impact does it have, good, bad, or indifferent? That is all based on your choice. So, just please, moving forward, don't blame time. You can't tell me, hey, I couldn't make it here on time because I hit a red light. No, that means you left way too late and one bloody light got you in trouble, so stop blaming time. No one likes it. It's completely unacceptable, and it's a weak, weak, weak, weak reason.
Glenn Mattson
The other one that's right behind it in terms of popularity is called pay time, no pay time. Now, for those of you who are Sandler, you know what pay time, no pay time is. You heard me talk about it a lot, if not, just imagine doing a t-bar like the old Ben Franklin t-bar, right? Positive negatives. On one side of the t-bar is a word called pay-time, and on the other side of the t-bar is something called no-pay time. Now, no-pay time is the thing that you have to do to get you ready for the pay-time. Things like service, follow-up, paperwork, going into LinkedIn, and getting your nearest neighbors for referrals. Maybe it's working on your proposal or your presentation. That's all no-pay time. And by the way, if you look at an average day, there are about 60 no-pay time activities that are relatively easy for you just to start to name off right one after another. After calling a doctor for the APS, following up on certain issues with your clients to see where they are, et cetera. There’s just tons of them.
Glenn Mattson
Your pay-time is about six things. Prospecting, qualifying, closing. It’s really not many. Now, here's the issue that happens with excuse making, and it's guilt-free, I hate this one, that people will blame the no-pay time activities as the reason they did not do their pay-time. Oh, I couldn't get to my prospecting calls today because I had to spend seven hours on my proposal. Come on, man. Really? So, you're going to blame and use the reason you didn't do the thing that’s going to generate revenue, the thing that’s going to put money in your pocket, the thing that’s going to make sure that you can pay your bills. You're going to tell me that you didn't get to that stuff because you had other stuff you had to get done. Your pay-time is the most important thing in your day. So, part of the issue is, is that we've used the trouble line, which separates the pay-time and no-pay time. We've kind of started to use our no-pay time as guilt-free avoidance. That's acceptable in some teams, to why we're not doing and choosing not to do the pay-time. How can you tell me that you put three proposals together and you cleaned up your CRM, but you couldn't make six outbound phone calls if that was your pay time activity? There's no way, you can't do it. So, when you start looking at these two excuses, you’ve got to live by the world of “and”, not “or”. You’ve got to do both things in the time period that you have. You don't just do pay-time or no-pay time. It's not the way it works. You’ve got to do both.
Glenn Mattson
When we were kids, we had a boat to water ski with. It was a piece of junk, and it wasn't very strong. When it would start to pull you to water ski, you'd have to plane. So, just imagine someone, you know, floating in the water. They have the line going between their legs, they have two skis shooting out of the water, and the boat pulls you. As you sit there, as you're sitting in a chair, believe it or not, in the water, the boat will start to pull you, and suddenly, you stand up. Okay. Now, if you don't have a boat with a lot of engine to it, that water is pounding against the skis, which is now going over your skis into your face. You're getting waterboarded. So, when we were kids, we'd have tell all our friends, listen, you just got to hang on and suck a little water. You're going to get up. You just got to hold on. Sure enough, the majority of them would let go right before they planed out. How many of you, as a salesperson, then became a manager, and three-fourths of new stuff was added to your list of things you had to get done, no one said, here's an extra five hours a day. You figured it out every time we expand our responsibilities, but we don't expand time. We have to figure it out. That's the life of “and” not, “or”. So, when you start looking at your goals moving forward, take ownership. Make sure you don't use, oh, I couldn't do it because of, and or time.
Glenn Mattson
Now, my last couple of minutes are for those who are in management or leadership, and you've heard me speak about IPD in the past. It's one of my favorite acronyms. It stands for identify, predict, or plan, decide, and then execute. Many managers will coach and supervise the execution part and feel like it's Groundhog Day. If you have issues with a lack of accountability, not getting the results, not hitting certain numbers, and that's in the execution phase, that means you made a mistake in the decision stage.
Glenn Mattson
So, let's suppose hypothetically that we have Bill and Glenn. Bill's a salesperson and Glenn's the manager. Now, Bill's supposed to be getting three referrals on a weekly basis. Bill, in the last three months, has not gotten three referrals in a week. Now Bill's not making money. So now Bill and I are sitting down. We're having a one-on-one. Bill says, “Listen, I’ve got to make up a lot of money, I'm not making as much as I should. I'm not asking for referrals.” Then he says to me, “You know, Glenn, I think I have to get it up to six. I have to start asking for six referrals.” Now, I know some of us may be cheerleaders. Maybe we're the ones that are selling our own people on their behavior or selling our people on the results. “Hey, this is why you need to do it. You can do this. I believe in you.” I want you to throw all that out the window.
Glenn Mattson
What I'd like you to do is, I want you to create a little doubt. I want you to be more of a question mark. So, when Bill says “Glenn, I have to do six”, I'm going to turn around and say, “Bill, I get that. I understand your logic and your reason behind it, but dude, don't you think that's a massive jump? I mean, are you sure about this?” Not, “Bill, you're right, this is what you have to do”. Not, “Bill, thank God you finally figured this thing out”. Not, “Hey Bill, congratulations, welcome back to the team.” No. What I want you to do is, and these are three one-liners you can write down.
Glenn Mattson
Are you sure about this? Will you do this, though? Man, that seems like an awful lot. You can put these together and they're awesome. I even have a client of mine who, during goal setting, I shared this with him during breakfast. The first person that got up said, “Dave, we're going to have to do A, B, and C, and this is how we're going to get there. We’re going to have to really buckle down and get this done.” Dave just sat back in his chair and goes, “Yeah, I hear you want to go with that. I can understand why. But man, that seems like a big jump.” Now, Nathan, who is the individual in front of Dave, buckled; he didn't even defend it. He didn't even fight. He goes, “You know, I know I thought it was kind of high, but I thought that's what you wanted to hear.” So, team, if you want truth, don't sell it to them. If you want truth, don't be the cheerleader. If you want truth, why don't you put a little question mark on what they're giving to you to see if they defend it.
Glenn Mattson
Here's your last piece I want to give you. And by the way, this works like a charm. The last one is how you get personal commitment to their behaviors. It's called bringing the future into the present. So, let's go back to the scenario I have with Bill. Bill says, “Glenn, I’m supposed to be getting three referrals.” He's gotten one, two, maybe at best, never gotten three. He has to do a lot of makeup. Mathematically, he's figured out that the makeup is getting six. “Glenn, I’ve got to get six referrals per week.” “Bill, I listen, I hear where you're coming from. I understand why, economically, that makes sense, and mathematically, that makes sense, but dude, that's a huge jump. Are you sure about this?” That's my first one. Bill comes back and goes, “Absolutely, I'm in.” Now I'm getting his personal commitment. Now, what I do is I use the excuses that Bill uses on me now against him. So, I'll say this, “Bill, I appreciate that. So next week when we sit down one-on-one, you're not going to tell me that you couldn't get to your six referrals because you don't have enough time, are you? Hey Bill, when we sit down next week, and for whatever reason you're going to tell me, but something's going to pop up, which is the reason that you didn't do six. We're not going to have that conversation again, are we?”
Glenn Mattson
So, team, if you're on leadership, whatever they give you as their action items, that's called the cookbook, right? Those are leading indicators. Instead of you being a cheerleader and selling it to them, create doubt. When they push even harder, which is what you want, by the way, when they push harder that they're going to do it, that's when you bring up their excuses. “Hey, how do you want me to handle this if you bring this up? I want to make sure we're on the same page, so I'm not going to hear this from you, will I?” What you're saying is we won't have a conversation around this. So, bring the future into the present.
Glenn Mattson
So, for those of you who are providers or have a certain responsibility for executing results, remember, stop making excuses. Own your decisions. Own the outcome of those decisions. Problems only happen because you did or didn't do something, or you said or didn't do something you should have. That's it. Stop blaming time, stop blaming other things that you did during the day, and don't hide. If you're in management, stop being a cheerleader. Stop being someone who's selling them what they need to do from leading indicators. Get them to sell to you, and then you bring up the excuses.
Glenn Mattson
All I want you to think about as you're parting, and getting ready to go on with your day, is just imagine your world. Imagine what others' world would look like if people kept their word. You know, this morning when you woke up, here's my last thing I’ve got to ask you real quick. When you woke up this morning, did you snooze? Did you hit the snooze button, or did you get up? By the way, that's your first excuse of the day. If you're supposed to get up at seven o'clock, you get up at seven o'clock. If you're supposed to get up at 6:45, get up at 6:45, don't have your alarm go off, and then snooze, then snooze, then snooze. If you're already setting the day, you're already starting your day with an excuse.
Glenn Mattson
I look forward to more with you on the Building Blocks of Success. If any of you are out there looking to overcome your excuses from yourself and or your team and you're looking for assistance in help in doing that, feel free always to reach out to us at glennm@sandler.com.
As always, be your best and keep selling. I'll talk to you soon.
Glenn Mattson
This is the Building Blocks of Success with Glenn Mattson.
Connect with Sandler
.0000000000000.png)