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- [00:00]
A
You're listening to the Sales Hunter podcast. My name is Mark Hunter, the Sales Hunter. And hey, how's your competitive mindset? You know, let me tell you something. Sales is a lot more emotional than you ever realize. And it's a lot more about your mindset than you ever realize. Helping me unpack the subject today, JBJ Jeb Blunt Jr. He's going to be joining me. Why am I talking? Let's get the show going.
- [00:23]
B
Right now, you're listening to the Sales Hunter podcast with Mark Hunter, where the focus is to help you as a salesman, sell with confidence and integrity. And now here's your host.
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A
It's time we cut to the chase and say, what is a competitive mindset? JBJ Jeb Blunt Jr. Sales gravy. Welcome to the show. What is a competitive mindset?
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C
Hey, Mark, I am so glad to be here. I'm often the host of a podcast and not sitting in this chair. And I like your radio voice. Welcome to the Sales Hunter podcast.
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A
You're listening to the mighty 95 KQZ radio 719.
- [01:02]
C
Okay, that's all I came here for, actually. That was, that was, that was what I wanted. A competitive mindset. No, a competitive mindset is it, it really is a, it's sort of a lifestyle. It's how you kind of construct your outlook on the world. I think of it as a more of a philosophy than, than sort of a mode of function and how you go about things. I mean, you can be in competitive mindset about almost anything and it doesn't require, you know, physical activity or, you know, mental stress necessarily. It just means that you are putting yourself in a place where you are constantly measuring to a standard. And so when I think of competitiveness, you can do this yourself. So you set goals, you have, you have goal plan, we have goal planning guides. You know, every, every sales trainer you follow on LinkedIn probably has some version of this. And you go through those. Goal planning, that is your standard. So if you're, if you have a competitive mindset that you are trained to exceed those, those marks, you have this in a sales organization or you have quotas that, that is your competition. You're competing against a quota. And for me, there's lots of ways to go about this in your career. But if you don't practice competition outside of your 9 to 5 job in your, you know, everyday career, it can be pretty difficult to show up and, and be exactly who you want to be as a, as a competitor, which is what professional selling is. It's you know, the elite athletes of the business world. So if, if you have a competitive mindset, you probably should be practicing that in parts of your life that you genuinely enjoy, because that's going to derive a lot more effort and push you to a level that you haven't been before. And I think that's why I'm here to talk to you today, Mark. We've got a lot of stuff to cover, but essentially, in a very, very simple way, competitive mindset is the standard by which you're going to measure yourself and try and exceed it.
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A
Okay. There's so much there that I want to unpack. You use the word philosophy, you know, and that, that's cool in terms of the competitive mindse, determine in terms of doing it at work and away from work. And there's a lot of things. But let's start unpacking this one by one here. Can you have a competitive mindset if you're not accountable to something or someone?
- [03:12]
C
I think that you can't you as long as you are accountable to yourself. So I'll, I'll kind of qualify that question. Can you, can you have a competitive mindset without being accountable to somebody else? Yes, it is much, much harder. It is way harder than any other kind of accountability because when you have someone else to hold you accountable, then there's some sort of human, like, we just are societal creatures. We just want to please other human beings. It's just kind of the way that we're biologically built. So it makes it a lot easier to be held to a standard when you have the outside accountability. Now, can you be have a competitive mindset without being accountable to your own internal dialogue and yourself and that person that you have to talk with and look in the mirror every single day? I don't believe that's possible. If you're not holding yourself to some accountability, then there is no competition. And so therefore, by definition, you're not competing if you have no accountability.
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A
Oh, I love what you said there. Because the first person you're accountable to is yourself, and that's absolutely paramount. But I think you do really have to have somebody else who is help holding you accountable because it's easy for us, that little voice in the back of our head to make up excuses to make up. You know, I don't need to work out today. I don't need to make these calls today. Well, you know, I didn't make my prospecting calls. I'll just make them tomorrow or, you know, I'll get. We all we can put things off, and accountability is so key. But the challenge that I find, and I'd be curious of your thoughts, how do people find who should be that right accountability partner for them? Because it isn't always your boss. You know, it isn't. You know, sometimes it is, but a lot of times it isn't. How do you find that right accountability partner?
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C
Finding the right accountability partner, you have to be blessed in a lot of ways. I mean, I'm genuinely lucky. Lucky that I have a. A spouse and a partner who works at sales, grieving, is in our business and knows the industry, and she can hold me accountable to a lot of things because I'm blessed with that partnership inside of my business. At Sales Gravy, we have wonderful mentors. And I. I'm Jeb Blunt Jr. But we have a team of sales trainers that are the elite of the world. And I use, for example, Sarah Greer, who runs our coaching department. She is one of my partners. I even have an outside sales. Sorry, I have an outside business coach. So, Mark, I actually work with a coach that is completely outside of my business to hold me accountable to certain leadership goals that I have that aren't even necessarily related to sales, but communication and becoming a better person. So in terms of finding them, one, you can evaluate coaches. I think that this is probably the best route for most sellers is to find someone that can coach you and actually sit down with you and hold you accountable to your goals. Secondarily, you have to start asking. The only way to find a good coach is the same way you date. Sometimes you got to find bad accountability partners before you find a good one. And in, in my case, I'm one of those people that if I don't do something immediately, I will forget to do it. And so the way that I've solved this for my world is I. LinkedIn's a great place. If you build a following there, they will hold you accountable to things. Or you can. You can hold that space for your accountability. But I ask around the office. I share things with people. I say. I say things like I am. I'm committing to bringing in four new deals this month. And I'm saying that to just other people at random, mostly because I want to say it out loud and have other people know that this is what I'm going for. And the good accountability partners are people who want to see you win. And those people will eventually start to rise to the top. So your mentors, other sellers in your business, the more experienced leaders in your organization, if you start talking about how, what progress you want to make, there's somebody in that group who is willing to help you make that happen. But if you don't ask them for it, they'll never just raise their hand and say, yeah man, I'm really looking for a coaching client. Or like I'm really looking for a coaching relationship where I can mentor somebody. Many people are, but they're not going to just say that out loud every single day and wait for you to hear them. You have to go out there and ask for that partnership. And it is a lot like dating. I would just say the way to solve that is go put yourself out there and ask for it.
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A
Okay. I love what you're saying there because you can have goals but if you don't have somebody holding you accountable, in other words, you haven't gone public with those goals to at least your, your accountability partner. Chances of you achieving them, not, not going to be there because you're going to make excuses. I love the fact that you say, you walk around the office and you say, hey, I'm going to. And you hang out with high performing people. So when you say you're going to close four more deals this month, I have a feeling others in the office are holding you accountable. I just have that little sense now. Here's the thing that I like. If we don't go public, and this is where I think so many salespeople fall down, well, they have their quota and their boss and so forth. But they really never go public with what their plan is. Their plan is X number of calls, X number of meetings, X number of steps that they're going to do. And I think this is why. And you raised another good point. You said you have an outside coach. I think that's key because they can see you through a different lens than people inside the office do. Yeah. How did you find that outside coach?
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C
We work with a wonderful organization. I'll shout them out. The entree leadership organization is who we work with from a business consulting perspective. So more, more in the leadership and communication through an organization. Not, not like selling coaching, but they're wonderful people. So if you ever are interested, you know, reach out to me. I'm happy to give you a testimonial and connect you with the right people. But the way that I found my coach was inside of that organization. There were several options. There's so many people to coach you. This is a person who is doggedly, I would say direct. Like she does not give me a break. She's she's not letting me go through at the end of the month without completing certain milestones that I have committed to myself. So she pulls out what I want from my own words. I have to speak into existence what it is that I'm going to be doing. It is not a prescribed goal setting session. This coach does not say, these are my goals for you, now go execute them. I, out loud say my goals to this person. And then every week this person's following up with me and they are holding me accountable in our next meetings. And when I don't do those things, we have to start over. I, I don't get to progress any further than where I was in the last meeting. And, and that is a really powerful incentive because I hate sitting in one spot and, and having the same conversation again. It is painful to me. So when I, when I found this outside coach, what I, what I was looking for was not someone who is a cheerleader. I'm not looking for someone who says, hey, no, I heard your goals. Those are great. I'm cheering for you, rooting for you. Like, that's all fun and that's. I like that. I like people to do that. But you need someone who's going to tell you, especially from an outside perspective, which is why that coach is so valuable to me, is you said these things, but you're not acting these things. And though you talk a big talk, you can't come to this table and tell me that you've done everything you can. We can see the results here. And it's difficult for someone inside of your organization to say that without, you know, tension of possibly employment or getting on pips or, you know, having tension in the relationship. If they don't, if they aren't the best communicators and they haven't trained themselves in this way, which is why a professional coach, they, they have the language and the tools to push you and, and really pull you further along than, you know, than potentially somebody within your organization that you have more of a daily relationship with.
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A
I like that because so many people, they say they have a coach. Now what you have is you have a cheerleader, you have a cheerleader because it's a family member, it's a good friend or something like that. Well, I'm accountable to them. They're not holding your feet to the fire. And this is so key top performers. And I use Tom Brady always as an example. And I'm not a fan of the New England Patriots, nor was I a fan of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. But anyway but put that aside. Tom Brady had at any one time between six and nine coaches for every different facet of his life. Now think about that. Here, here is a goat the greatest of all time. Okay. I, I give him all the credit in the world. Absolutely superior performer. You think that hey I, I why do I need coaches? But he had between six and nine coaches at any that says that we in sales because we're in, we're in a competition. We need to have that coach too. We, we need to have somebody who is not cheerleading us but coaching us. Yeah. So walk me through another word. How is coaching impacted you?
- [12:09]
C
Well first and foremost I would say the, the development that I have made. So I'll just start with the outcome. The I have been in this outside coaching for I would say almost 12 months now. Going on a year. I'm actually crossing over into a year this month. The, the, the progress I have made as a human being is far and above what I can do on my own. I do the only way I can. I can liken this is to a skill. So this is a little bit more ethereal with the leadership coaching and I can give you exact metrics on this but I play guitar. I'm a mediocre guitar player. I have been playing for about 10 years. I've never had a coach ever in my life for guitar. Haven't done it, didn't get lessons, anything like that. It has taken me over 10 years now to get to a place where I can just play scales over a blues backing track on YouTube. It took 10 years to do that. That is self taught mediocrity, unintentional noodling that I just worked myself through and only with intentional self practice and discipline was able to even make that kind of progress with a coach. All of the effort. And I'm a smart like Mark I, I, I like I don't want to have a big old head but I'm a smart guy. I know what I should be doing. I know what's right. I and I and I know how to create success because I've lived in organizations that have ultra high performers. But look, your own brain is your worst enemy. With the 8 inches between right here in your ears is the thing that's holding you back more than anything else. When you have a coach, you have a second brain. Another eight inches that's outside of your control is in another human. And when you are utilizing two brains they hold you accountable not only to the activities every single day to do those because if you practice 30 minutes a day and not just 15 hours on that Saturday before your competition, then you are going to make significant progress. And then utilizing that other brain, they see things that you would never see before. They take things from a different perspective, their frame of reference, you know, as a psychological perspective, they have a different frame of reference than you. So sometimes you're gonna. In a. Pardon my language, you're gonna bitch and moan about things that seem really difficult to you. And this other brain's going, yeah, but you have all the capacity to get this done easily. You've done it in 16 other different places. Why couldn't you have the confidence to do it here? And just that awareness, just that simple awareness alone from an outside coach, I have progressed. I'm 28 years old. I have leadership skills that I probably wouldn't develop on my own until I was in my 40s. And it's only thanks to a coach who can help me be a better version of myself than I could do by myself. So the impact of coaching on me is that it's not so much that they had something that I didn't have. It's more that they pulled out of me what I already possessed and just wasn't tapping into based on my own limitations within the 8 inches in my own brain.
- [15:09]
A
And see, there's something that you said there. You use the word leadership several times, and it's really cool. No matter what you hire a coach for in your life, it's going to develop your leadership skills because again, and those transcend into everything else. I love how you're painting this. And of course, this is one of the beautiful things that you know. Again, not only is it a coach, but then it's the trainings, sales gravy. You have such a library, such a collection of training tools available. And of course, we should talk about Outbound coming up this fall, right? Yeah. I mean, what a great way to come and learn from. From peers and network with hundreds of other people like you who are looking to get to the next level. Hey, let's go and do an unselfish plug. No, we'll do a selfish plug. What's the website to register or what's the website to get registered?
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C
If you were in, if you were a sales rep or you're a sales leader. More importantly, if you're a leader and you're looking to invest in a sales team this year, the. The best, baddest, most impactful conference is Outbound Conference. You go to outboundconference.com you can get all of those details. The reason it's so powerful is that Mark and I have experienced this for almost going on 10 years now. We've had so many of these conferences. It's, it's not only that you are going to a place where there are actual coaches who actually coach people and have been in the trenches and know what they're talking about and know how to help people and then they're delivering that value on stage to you and, and to so many other people. It's that all of that information is being shared with other ultra high performers who are sitting right next to you in that room. And you're going to spark up conversations that are just so much more impactful than even the people on stage. The conversations people have in the breaks in the, in the dinners and the VIP event events and the bowling alley that we're going to be doing and all the cool stuff that you end up going to is they found more value from each other than they would have ever expected. So you have to get your team to Outbound Conference and see the wonderful speakers like Mark is going to be there. And we're so excited to put this on. So go to outboundconference.com shameless plug. It is the biggest, baddest sales conference on earth.
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A
It's not a shameless plug because successful people hang out with successful people. Let's go back and take Tom Brady. I never ever heard of Tom Brady hanging out on, on, on some backlot playing flag football. No, he wouldn't do that. He, he, he is going to immerse himself with top performers at all times. And this is what top performing salespeople hang out with. Top performing salespeople. And top performing salespeople have coaches, they have people. And, and this is, this is so key because again, it all starts with accountability and that competitive mindset. Hey, back when we were in, in the green room. Why do we always say the green room before we began recording? But you mentioned that you're back doing figure skating now, right?
- [18:09]
C
Yes. I'm not, I'm new to it.
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A
Talk to me about that because that's a competitive mindset, right?
- [18:15]
C
Yeah. I'll tell you quick. Just a quick backstory on me. Probably not relevant to most of this conversation other than it is my competition side. So I grew up playing all kind sports. I was baseball player growing up and then when I was in high school I was a four sport athlete. Played football, basketball, track, baseball. I was on all kinds of debate teams and, and I did the musicals and Everything, I was just involved in everything. I ended up going to college to run track, and I was a short sprinter, so I went like 400 meters. I did a 400 meter in about 50 seconds. I was a short sprinter. The 100 meter and the 200 meter, I wasn't as fast in those for whatever reason, so I didn't compete very well. And then I was a pole vaulter as well. So I got to like 15 and a half feet as a, as a competitive pole vaulter, which is not world records based, but it's, it's pretty high if you got up there upside down. I injured myself just through like wear and tear on my body when I was in college and ended up getting into professional sales during that period and kind of entering back into the world of business. And I lost my kind of taste for the competitive edge outside of business. It was kind of debilitating to have so many leg injuries and just not being able to push myself in the way that I had when I was a little younger and having a big break. I've been working with my wife, Ashley, who is near, not quite the Olympic figure skating. She can't do the quad axles, but she can do double axles, and that's pretty sweet. So she's really, really good at this sport. And I was working with her, getting my daughter to skating on practice. Columbia, South Carolina, which is like 45 minutes away, getting them to practice early in mornings on Saturday, sit in a cold freaking rink just waiting for them to get done. And just something dawned on me is like, I'd rather be out there doing something and getting warm than sitting around waiting for them to get done. So I kind of just decided that I would try my hand at figure skating. And what I learned is it really hit home for me some. Something was pulled out of me when I made that decision. I realized I really wanted to compete. Like, I really wanted to go and push myself and be the best version of myself that I could be. That translated into, okay, now I'm going to the gym almost every single day. I'm getting my running in. I'm. I'm actually tracking what I'm doing. I'm going to the workouts with the mindset that I'm sure to get better. Not to get, like, you know, yoked, not to get crazy strong, but to get better. That means I have to walk into the competitive mindset or walk into the weight room with the competitive mindset that today is about getting better. That means failing more. That means making sure that I'm, you know, I'm pushing myself to a certain kind of limit while being healthy. And then what that means is that it translates into how I eat. So now I eat differently because I am looking to push myself to that next 1%. And because of this competition I have coming up in August, I've never danced, figure skated, did any of that stuff before in my life. I'm sure gonna. I'm gonna look funny and in skates or whatever that is. Like, I'm gonna be a weirdo. And I think that pressure of. Of, you know, not putting yourself out there to. To. To not be judged keeps us from really hitting that competitive mindset. Because Tom Brady didn't give two rats patooties if you thought he was a good quarterback or not. He was a good quarterback. Getting into the mindset that I am going to be the best I can be no matter what you think freed me up to allow this to bleed into all of my life. So I take the energy of practicing, of being a competitive person in my personal life. And then when I walk in to 8am on Monday morning after a Sunday of, you know, going on a long run and getting my food in and getting my sleep in and getting my hydration in and thinking about what I'm going to do this week, I enter in what I call a balcony. So I have a balcony, and I have a basement. I go into Monday morning. I want to be in my balcony. And that's the competitive mindset, because I can fail in my balcony and I can fail in my basement. When I fail in my balcony, I learn from it and I get better. So that is the journey that I'm on right now, and it's really exciting. So I'm glad you asked me about it.
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A
I love that. And what that is is this paints the picture.
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C
We got to wrap up the show
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A
here in just a second. But it paints the picture that everything is about both professional and personal. The top performers professionally in sales also are achieving something very significant personally in their lives, and that is how they keep themselves really accountable. So, hey, absolutely fantastic. Love having you on the show today. Tell people sales gravy real quick. What's it about?
- [22:47]
C
Sales gravy. We are the sales training organization to help you win more, do more, and sell more. That's our quick pitch. I did the marketing. I was the marketing leader for about 18 months. So you're welcome for that, really. Simply put, if you are looking for resources on how to improve your game, we have every everything at sales gravy. For enterprise sales teams to individual sellers. Go to. The best way to go look at this is go to Sales Gravy University. It's learn.salesgravy.com we have all of our providers on there, 55 plus of them, 1500 hours. People like Mark Hunter are on there. So go check out Sales Gravy University and, and you can always get in touch with us. You can read our books. We've got like 18 books in print. My, my father, Jeb Blunt senior is a machine. Our latest book is the LinkedIn Edge. It, it goes really hand in hand with integrity first selling. So go pick up both of those books and if, hey, if you, if you're lucky, if you reach out to me, I might be able to get both of them signed. I know the guys who wrote them.
- [23:41]
A
Hey, there you go. I love it. I love it. Indeed. So much learning. And that's what top performers do. They never stop learning. And of course, go to outbound conference.com get registered for outbound this coming fall. Hey, you've been listening to the Sales Hunter podcast. Two episodes a week. One like this where you do a deep dive with a subject matter expert. Second one is where I just take on a single topic.
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C
Why do we do the show?
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A
It's to help you see and achieve what you didn't think was possible. I'm Mark Hunter.
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C
Great selling.