Bulletproof Selling

Shawn Rhodes has leveraged his former life as a war correspondent to become an international expert in how the best teams continuously improve pipelines and performance. He’s a Tampa-based TEDx speaker and his work studying teams in more than two dozen countries, in some of the most dangerous places on the planet. He has been published in news outlets like TIME, CNN, NBC and Forbes. His clients have included Deloitte, Coca-Cola and dozens of similar businesses. He’s a nationally syndicated columnist with the business journals and author of a book, which I am a big fan of,?Bulletproof Selling: Systemizing Sales For the Battlefield Of Business. That is a ton of alliterations. No one loves literation more than I do. Welcome, Shawn.

It is a pleasure, John. Thanks for noticing all the alliterations.

It is just golden, the battlefield of business. It’s a really interesting place to start because people talk about the war, The Art of War, and all these other things. Are you in fact in a battle when you are in a sales situation or has the buyers become more sophisticated? I like to think of it as you are more of a co-pilot as opposed to behind enemy lines. We are going to get to how you came up with the title because before the show, you and I were talking about how we spend so much time and care crafting even with the cover image is going to be, let alone with the title and subtitle are. I want to have you start your story at the beginning. I’m going to give you complete freedom to start that story anywhere. Childhood, college, wherever you want that you were like a lot of kids grow up going, “I see they are covering the war on TV. I want to go there and do that.” How did that even happen?

This is something that a lot of entrepreneurs will recognize. In high school, I had a lot of potentials but really no outlet for it. I knew that if I went to college right after high school, I was going to do a lot of drugs, probably make a lot of bad life decisions and potentially waste that opportunity. Talking with mentors and friends, I realized I just didn’t have some life skills that I might need like self-discipline, integrity, ambition, the ability to define a goal and then plan the steps out to achieve it. Things that make us successful as adults and successful in the world of business.

The choices for me were to wander the country with a flute-like Caine in Kung Fu. That was an option for me. The other choice was to join the military. It’s polar opposites if you will. The military seemed like it would be more regular meals and maybe a place to sleep every once in a while, so that’s the choice that I made. I started looking at the branches because each branch, you will get this as a marketer, they have a very specific pitch. They are looking for a very specific type of recruit. The Army is all about travel. The Air Force, wants intelligent people to work with technology. The Navy, also about travel, got to love the water and being on the ocean. The Marines were the only ones that were communicating this warrior ethos as a recruiting pitch. Honor, courage, commitment, the few, the proud, these tag lines that we really become familiar with, especially the United States and uniform, obviously can’t be beaten.

As I started talking to the Marines, they took a look at my test scores because you take a test to find out where you might belong in the military. Every job you could do as a civilian, they have it in the military. They said, “Shawn, you failed everything, except for verbal comprehension. On that account, you are off the charts.” They looked at all the jobs and they said, “You would fail as an infantryman so we are not going to let you do that. You would not be a good engineer. Everything you built would fall apart immediately so you are not going to do that.” They went down the list of jobs. The one that they had that would be a good fit for verbal comprehension was as a journalist, writer, photographer, broadcaster, what they called a combat correspondent.

For your readers that have ever seen the old Stanley Kubrick movie, Full Metal Jacket, the 1970s, 1980s movie about the Marines in Vietnam, I was Joker, running around on the battlefield with a camera and a notepad, just capturing the stories like old school. It was so much fun. I’ve got to travel the world. I did two combat tours in Iraq. I was there for the initial invasion in ‘03 and went back for the battles of Fallujah and Ramadi in ‘04. I’ve got to meet a lot of amazing human beings. It really prepped me for the work that I do now because I saw these men and women achieve the impossible every single day.

For those who are reading right now that aren’t familiar with urban combat, it got about a 50% mortality rate. If 50 people go into a building to clear it and there are bad people in there waiting to take them out, only 25 are expected to walk out of that building under their own power. Those are the statistical averages. You think the entrepreneurs that are trying to factor what their conversion rate might be for customer conversion or pitch 50% expected loss. That’s pretty steep, especially when it’s your life on the line. Yet, these Marines and Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets and Air Force Air Rescue men, I’ve got to work with the best to the best. They all had an incredible rate of coming out alive. The military wanted to know how they were able to do that. We recognized it wasn’t because they were hoping that they were going to be successful like so many entrepreneurs do. You think about the high failure rate of small businesses, it’s one lack of conversion, lack of sales, lack of revenue but the underlying issue is so many of us are just hoping that we are successful. We are not taking the time to train, plan, prepare, map out our strategy and then break it down into time-bound tasks that we can execute.

In addition to taking a look, I made that pitch. I’ve either got the funding or I didn’t. I’ve got the customer or I didn’t. What went right? What went wrong? How can I do better next time? These Marines that I was studying every day, that was their life because their life was on the line. They made sure after every mission to debrief and to take a look at how we could get better. What did we encounter that was unique? How do we share that with our sister units as fast as possible so they don’t have to learn the hard way? Look for that tripwire in that particular location, for instance. That allowed me to really begin taking what I have learned and saying, “How can I apply this into something that I’m in love with, which is the world of sales, the world of business?” That’s where the battlefield of business came from. Bulletproof Selling?is all about building those types of systems into your sales process so that you can remove hope as a strategy as well.

That’s a great tweet. Hope is not a strategy. This concept of debriefing after every call whether you win or lose, I think that’s where a lot of people think, “We don’t have to take a look at why we won. We won, who cares?” You are missing a huge opportunity there to figure out why you won so you can repeat that process. I guess we’ve just got lucky. Doctors do this when they lose a patient. They have an M&M thing where they literally sit around and talk about, “Was there anything we could have done that we don’t make that same mistake again or was this person terminal regardless?”

I can walk your readers through that process if you would like as it applies to a pitch for instance.

I think that would be incredibly valuable. I have had over 300 episodes, no one has offered that, so, please.

Whether you get off of a call or you are pitching your company for some funding, whatever that looks like, there are three places that you need to debrief after a sales meeting. We will just lump those all in the term sales meeting for ease of use here. The first thing you want to do is debrief yourself as the salesperson. What that looks like is, what could I have, knowing what happened, I know all the questions that were asked, I know what my responses were or were not if they ask a question, I couldn’t answer and that tainted, what was that situation. Debrief yourself. Knowing what you know now, what could you have researched, prepared, studied, done going in? What objections might you have really benefitted from in studying? I don’t have enough money or it doesn’t sound like you’ve got enough recurring capital. Your model is not sustainable. Whatever objections you’ve got that either got you the solution you want or didn’t, debrief yourself.

The second thing you want to debrief is your prospect. Debrief the customer on the other side of the call. Knowing what you know about them now, what would have been valuable to have to go in there? What pieces of knowledge do you know at the end of a call where they went to school? Where they live? How many family members they have? What interests they have? What challenges their company is going through? How much budget they do or don’t have for the product or service that you are offering? All of that might have been valuable to know going into you now know. Capture that. You are not going to be able to replicate it because you don’t have a crystal ball. Knowing what questions to ask earlier on in the sales process may be what comes out of debriefing your prospect.

Click through to read the rest of the interview.

If you want help on how to craft a better story,?my The Sale is in the Tale?online course is for you.

Are you tired of coming in 2nd place when you pitch?

Are you struggling to be persuasive without being pushy?

Are you looking for a way to become irresistible to your ideal clients??

Then The Sale is in the Tale?is for you.

If you want a private 15-minute strategy call to discuss how my course can help you?be a revenue rockstar,?click here?to book in a?time.