From Zero To MVP In 12 months — Interview with Jeff Sarault (Part 1)

Kale:?Today we have a special guest, Jeff Sarault, who is a business-to-business sales consultant and a Grant Cardone licensee. I want to give him a chance to talk about what he does, how he got to be where he’s at and how he helps small businesses increase their sales.

Jeff, thank you so much for joining me today.

Jeff:?Great to see you. And thanks so much for inviting me. It’s always great to have chats like this, so I’m looking forward to this one.

Kale:?I’ve been looking forward to this too. The opportunity to talk to somebody that is in your space that gets to talk to all sorts of different kinds of businesses as you consult with them and teach them sales really is up my alley of what I’m interested in.

I wanted to pick your brain about what you’ve seen as you’ve gone about your business in consulting, the different styles of leadership that you run into with these small businesses that you deal with and how you handle that in those different aspects.

Jeff:?Absolutely. I would love to chat about that. My background is really in the media. I work with a lot of sales teams and a lot of salespeople that come from media sales and those types of industries where they’re selling intangibles.

But the media industry, to focus a little bit on the leadership side of things, can be an archaic business. These TV stations, radio stations or traditional media outlets, people who have worked in those industries tend to have been in them for a very long time.

So the leaders tend to have very antiquated leadership styles, and that’s one of the things that I run into all the time. I’ll work with new sales reps and they’ll complain about how they’re being taught to do things that might have been effective in the eighties, but might not be so relevant to today’s world.

So when you talk about leadership, I find that a lot of times people get into these leadership positions sometimes by accident or by default, and they don’t often keep up to date with ways to be effective. Leaders in today’s world lean on things they may have known from the past, and I’m not sure that only applies to media.

I think every industry probably has people who don’t develop themselves and might be abrasive or irrelevant leaders in today’s society.

Kale:?That’s fascinating because I talk about this in a previous article. You get that a lot with technical experts and whether they started as a young salesman, whenever they came out of college or whatever their path was, and they’ve just naturally progressed because they hung around.

The truth is that they didn’t necessarily show any true leadership abilities other than maybe they were good at dealing with customers or at whatever thing in the media realm that qualifies them for promotion and then eventually leading other people.

That is fascinating because as with most industries, there isn’t much leadership training at all available to people and they just kind of figure it out.

Jeff:?It’s so true. Whether it’s leadership, sales, personal interaction, human resources or whatever. A lot of companies do a great job of product training but they don’t do the other stuff.

Unfortunately, the product training a lot of times is the least important training. You can sort of pick some of these things up along the way if you are at least a C-minus student, right?

However, leadership requires mentorship, it requires guidance. It requires you to view other people being good leaders so that you can adapt that into your personal style. When companies don’t offer that, or when a person doesn’t take it upon themselves to learn those skills, what happens is that every day that goes by, they become less effective and less relevant.

That’s where we see in a lot of what I like to call legacy businesses. The media, car sales and things like that where these are industries that have been around forever. I would venture to bet you could walk into almost any auto dealership lot in America today and know exactly what’s going to happen because it will be a cringeworthy experience.

It’s just the way they’ve always done it. That’s what we try cut off as quickly as possible in the businesses I work with. How do we help the people who are in charge of this business groom their people so that their customers want to do business here?

That’s the whole thing. They’ve been doing it the wrong way. They’re like: “Listen, this is the way we’ve always sold cars. So this is the way you’re going to sell cars.”

“Because we’ve always done it this way” is not a leadership style.

Kale:?No, and that’s not an excuse, right? And I think the underlying tone of what you were just saying is the intentionality of choosing to be a good leader, choosing to invest in your people instead of just being reactionary or making assumptions that they will develop themselves.

I think we’ve found, and most people understand the reality, those are the exceptions to the rule. Those natural leaders. Those guys that are really charismatic and they care about other people, that’s a very unique combination that just most people don’t have. You don’t naturally acquire it unless somebody is invested in you and mentored you towards that level.

Have you found that?

Jeff:?I have found that and I’ve found that people want to be led. That learning opportunity to find out for themselves or through mentorship or through leadership, how do I become better at this?

How do I help other people be good at this? But if people aren’t shown the way or the option, or that there’s a new viewpoint on how to be effective in whatever industry that you’re in, then the rot sets in.

If you leave a piece of meat on the counter for too long, it starts to rot because it’s just sitting there and it’s a dying thing unless you turn it into something else.

That’s true with your people if you just let them sit there in your sales, marketing or HR department and you don’t help them morph into something else along the way. Eventually, you will look around and go: “Well, this person isn’t very good anymore.”

No! They’re still good. You just haven’t developed them into anything that will help you grow your business. Teach by showing people, but the leader also has to grow. You can’t develop other people unless you yourself are growing.

Kale:?Yes, absolutely. Now switching gears just a little bit, if I remember correctly, you came out of a traditional corporate type of world. Can you explain and talk about that process?

Jeff:?When I was fresh out of high school, I got involved in radio and I thought that was what I was destined to do for life. One day, I was running around the radio station, I looked around and I noticed that some people were driving really nice cars and wearing really nice clothes.

I said: “What do they do here?”

And somebody answered: “They sell the advertising.”

I replied: “How do I learn to do all of that?”

So that led to other things, but eventually, I got into the corporate world where I was working for radio stations and TV stations that were owned by major media conglomerates.

As I met more leaders and managers, I learned what I resonated with and what I didn’t resonate with as an employee. What I learned today in my current world of coaching is that there are a lot of people who get into their industry and they’re excited about it and they want to learn more.

Then at some point, the leadership above them either runs out or gets stagnant, so therefore the person doesn’t see the way forward and they become complacent.

So what happened to me was I had spent 15 years in radio and television. I ended up getting out of that industry and moving into a sideline industry where I was working in the research business around media, which was great. I wanted to learn more about how advertising transactions worked and all this.

However, there was a level of technical selling there that I had not yet acquired. Even though I had 15 years of experience in media sales, I was in a different industry and no one had developed those technical sales skills in me. I thought I had them and I was wrong.

In the first two years of that job, out of 150 salespeople worldwide that we had, I was dead last for two years. I should have been fired.

I was looking around thinking: “Something does not add up here. I know I’m not this bad.”

So I found training and development opportunities. There’s always something more you can learn or a thing that you can do to be better and more effective.

I went from the worst to the MVP of our global sales team in a year. The only thing that I changed was the information I was putting in my brain. That was the switch.

The fundamentals that I had were correct. I needed to learn how to negotiate bigger deals in longer sales cycles, and I just didn’t have anybody teaching me how to do that.

I meet a lot of salespeople, leaders or people who have somehow become department heads in their organization and they don’t know how to go beyond that.

They don’t understand how to become a bigger player in their business or in their industry. The answer to that almost always is they need to learn something. To develop a skill. In that case, you bring more value to the organization and that’s what a lot of people miss.

Kale:?I want to go slightly off-topic, but you said something that was really interesting to me. Was there a specific moment when you realized you were the worst in the company?

Whether somebody told you: “Dude, you’re the worst salesman in our entire company”. Or you were looking at the reports and thinking, wait a minute, and you’re all the way at the bottom.

I think this is a really important one as my audience can be dealing with the type of person that you were at that point. What in your brain made you choose “I need to learn more”?

What made you think “I’m missing something” versus “I’m not good at this, I need to go find something else to do that I am better at”?

Jeff:?There was a specific moment actually. I had been in this job, in this particular role for two years, and I just wasn’t making the money I was wanting to make. I started just having conversations with other salespeople in the organization and I was learning how much they were billing for the company.

I was like: “Wow, that’s not my situation at all”, and then I figured out that I was the guy who sucked here. I don’t know if it was a self-awareness thing or if it was just a frustration issue, but I knew that I had had success in the past. I knew that those successes had led to promotions and job offers and all this other stuff.

There was a plateau in this particular job and I was thinking: “Do I quit? Have I just reached the top of my capability? I just decided that I wasn’t ready to be complacent.

I was ready to go find out if there was something else I could be doing here. So what I ended up doing was I decided to sit down. I looked at all the business I was working on, like the sales I was trying to get, or the customers that I couldn’t get to meet with me o whatever and I was like:

“What’s the missing piece?”

This was Part 1 of 2 as the interview keeps going for quite a while.

Would you have been able to act like Jeff after being the worst salesman for 2 years?

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