What Are The Success Secrets You Need To Know?

Chip Helm is an author, a speaker, a sales leader, and a consultant. He has more than 36 years of experience in sales leadership in the med-tech and life science industries. As a National Sales Manager for a multimillion-dollar medical device company, Chip helped seed and grow a standalone business unit from $0 to $50 million. Chip has honed his expertise and sales skills from the ground up starting as a District Manager who consistently ranked number 1 or 2 on the team and delivered $1 million in revenue year-over-year.

He’s worked alongside clinicians practicing medicine in fourteen different specialties and has established a robust network of genuine relationships across disciplines, physicians, associates, and academic institutions. He supported physicians with the development and launch of medical devices that advanced patient care and improved outcomes. He’s a national bestselling author of two books,?Everyday Sales Wisdom for Your Life & Career?and?Bigger than Sales: How Humility and Relationships Build Career Success.

Chip, I’m glad to have you. You certainly have an impressive career, an MBA from South Florida. You have a quote that I love, which is, “No matter the career you have chosen, you are in sales.” Let’s talk about that as we tap into your own story of origin. Take us back to your childhood or when you decided to major in Biology. When did you come to that realization that we are all in sales?

It’s funny. I started early on that all I wanted to do growing up was be a dentist and orthodontist like my father. I strived on it. I worked hard in high school and college. That’s all I wanted to do. I want to be like my dad. I’ve got lucky. I’ve got accepted to Indiana University School of Dentistry, and the world turned upside down on me. It wasn’t the academic part of dental school.

Three years into my dental school training, I found out that I didn’t have good small motor skills. I remember the day. It was June 15th. It was my dad’s birthday. I came home and bought him a card. We sat down together and he opened up the car. He and I cried because I said, “Dad, I’m sorry, I have let you down. I don’t think I can become a good dentist and I’m probably not going to be able to continue in dental school.” He goes, “I never knew.” I said, “I couldn’t tell you because I tried so hard and wanted it badly.”

What was interesting was there was a mentor and I believe that mentors. Like a quote for me in one of my Chipisms, “They don’t find you but you find mentors.” A guy named Bill Armstrong from Indiana University was a mentor and he said, “Chip, you’ve got great communication skills. I remember stories of people telling me that they would come to your dental clinic. The mothers and fathers with these kids, all the way down the hallway around the corner, outside waiting to come into your dental clinic because of your communication skills in a way that you connected with people.” I said, “Really?” He says, “There’s a medical company that would be good.”

I went through the interviewing process. Many years later, I have worked for the same medical company. He made a statement and he goes, “You would be good in sales.” “Into sales? What sales?” Back when I was growing up, there was no sales education. There was no diploma for sales like there is now. There’s nothing like that. What I have learned is it doesn’t matter what you do for your career. I don’t care if you are an IT or in marketing. I don’t care if you’re an entrepreneur. I don’t care if you wash dishes or a bartender. You are always communicating. Everyone is in sales.

You are either selling yourself every day, selling a widget or a concept. For me, I’m trying to sell my wife half the time. That doesn’t work well, so there you go. In a nutshell, bringing that together, I have always believed that no matter what you are doing in your career, you are in sales. The problem is, that is a myth to a lot of people. Most people in this country believe that if you don’t have sales in your title, then you are not in sales. I have been going around for the last few years trying to provide that message to everyone I can talk to. It doesn’t matter what you do in your career, you are in sales.

The irony from your bio is that one of your children became a dentist, is that correct?

It’s interesting to say that. My oldest is an orthopedic surgery resident at UT Houston. My daughter is a veterinarian. Last but not least, my football player, Sam, is in dental school at Indiana University and wants to become an orthodontist like his grandfather.

I love that it still runs in the family. We discussed before the show that I also thought I wanted to be a dentist when I was ten years old. I liked my dentist. As a kid, I thought that was a great job and my parents gave me a model tooth. I went into pre-dentistry and didn’t get as far as you did. I thought, “I don’t think I’m good with my hands either.”

I took a Sculpting class. That’s where I first was introduced to the concept of negative space. Between that and the Biochemistry, I went, “I’m out.” It is devastating when you are young because you don’t have a frame of reference. You make a decision, “I’m going to do this,” and you put your nose to the grindstone, and years later, you go, “I have to reinvent myself.”

Little did I know that I would have to reinvent myself much later in my career when I’ve got laid off from a sales job. This concept of reinvention and resilience is something I wanted to ask you about, especially now that you are a parent of grown children and you see this as a sales keynote speaker yourself. How do you help people become resilient? Sales, as we know, is a lot of rejection.

When you become resilient, it’s all in your heart. When you do things with the right intent and in the right heart, most of the time, you will go down the right path. You may not get to where you are going, may not become a CEO, may not be exactly where, God willing, you want to go but if you do things with the right heart and intent, then you will find that resilience. Most people in this country don’t have passions. If you can discover and uncover your passion, I have three and I’m lucky, then you never will have a job.

To this day, my wife’s like, “My husband wakes up with a huge smile on his face and it cracks me up. He wants to get up in the morning and wants to go to work.” It’s not work for me. I haven’t had a job in over 37 years. It’s a combination of uncovering and discovering your passions. It’s also a combination of being genuine, heartfelt, and doing things with the right intent and heart. Hopefully, you come across with that humility, that sincerity to people. You will reach your goal of where you want to go.

In your book,?Everyday Sales Wisdom for Your Life Career, I resonated with the concept of how important it is to communicate soft skills. As a storytelling keynote speaker myself, I’m constantly talking to people about how soft skills make you strong. For me, soft skills are storytelling, listening, and empathy. I would love to know if there’s anything else you put into that list. If so, what other soft skills do you see people need?

First of all, it’s not what you say to people. It’s how you say things to people. People don’t understand that you don’t have to have a firm fist. You can talk with kindness and it’s your voice, you raise your tone. It’s not what you say to someone. I like to repeat things because if you repeat things, that means it stays with you. It’s important and you will take adherence to it. You are right in that list of empathy and sympathy. The Golden Rule says, “Treat people like you want to be treated.” Chip’s Golden Rule is, “Treat people how they want to be treated.”

I have a great friend of mine who’s a president of a big car dealership here in Bloomington, Indiana. Here’s how you put it. He goes, “Treat your employees like you want your employees to treat your customers.” You can’t say it better than that. It starts at the top and moves down for any kind of corporation, company or whatever you do for your career. We don’t have enough of what I call humility in this country.

How we look at things and put other people’s thoughts first is the old servant leadership but it’s more than that. Do you care about the other person? Do you want that person to be successful? Do you want to mentor that person? I’m big in mentoring. That’s part of what you are talking about as far as soft skills. I like the word soft skills. There are a lot of people who don’t like to use that word but I believe it’s right and spot on to use soft skills in how you talk to people, what you say to people, how you listen to someone, and how you put them first.

Always think about the other person and learn about that other person. I will leave you one thing and you can continue. One of the greatest leaders that you could ever be is the one that from day one, always wants you to get you from A to Z. If you want to become a vice president or whatever you want to do in your company, that person, that leader is more worried about getting you into that position than they are worried about their own career.

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