Mike Irving - What the Best Business Owners Do Differently

In 3, 2, 1.

Welcome back to the Becoming Preferred podcast.

Do you ever feel like you've hit a ceiling in your business or career?

You're successful, you've got a great team, but there's a nagging feeling that you're capable of more if only you could get unstuck.

Our guest today understands that feeling better than anyone.

He's the founder of Advanced Business Abilities, a coaching company built specifically for established business owners and professionals who are ready to break through to that next level of growth without sacrificing their health or their values.

With over two decades of leadership experience, from launching his first business at 21 to managing a national salesforce of over 300, he knows the entrepreneurial journey from the ground up.

He's ditched the generic one size fits all approach to coaching in favor of something deeply personal and effective.

And he brings a refreshingly honest and grounded voice to the conversation.

And he's here to help us do the work that actually works.

Please join me for my conversation with the founder of Advanced Business Abilities, Mike Irving.

Well, hey, Mike.

Welcome to the program.

We're delighted to have you, Michael.

Thanks for having me.

I'm grateful to be here.

Now, where are we speaking?

There's a little bit of an accent there.

Let's tell everyone where you're from.

Well, there's a story behind that.

So I grew up in Boston and lived there Till I was 18, went to university, played baseball.

When I was 21, I landed in Sydney, Australia, and I was supposed to be in Sydney for six months as a study abroad student and then come back to the US and get a job and be a normal human being.

But that was never going to be the path for me, so I stayed in Australia.

I started a business about 18 months later teaching sales and lived in Sydney for five years and then moved to Perth on the west coast.

And that's been home 22 years.

Right now, my wife and I are actually traveling and we're in Canada.

So I'm talking to you right now from Newfoundland on the east coast of Canada.

Oh, excellent.

Well, I'm actually in the Calgary, Alberta office, so welcome to now make sure you hit George street in Newfoundland there.

Oh, I have done already.

Yeah.

Make sure you get screeched in.

Have you had the screeched in experience yet?

Yes, yes, we did get screeched in.

We had a really fun night.

We've had a couple of fun nights out at George street, including the George Street Festival this year and Blue Rodeo was the star show, so it was good.

Oh, Lovely.

Yeah.

They're coming up this way in the next couple of weeks ago, so.

Great band, great Canadian band as well.

Glad you're enjoying Newfoundland.

There's, it's all the pretty homes.

You'll see some whales, you see the icebergs.

And like I say, George street, you don't have to walk too far to the nearest watering hole.

So it's all.

No, definitely, definitely not.

Fantastic.

Well, I'm really excited about this one because it's in an area that I personally spend time in and I'm always looking at how do I learn?

And you really focus on blocking our path to success.

What led you to this though?

So you started to write, you started the sales part.

I think you came from a degree in biology, so you were a scientist at one time and then you obviously transformed into something different from a sales point of view.

What was the catalyst for that?

Well, so I never actually finished the degree in biology.

Funny enough, when I landed in Sydney, and this might be a little bit off track, but I took a course on US history as an American taught by an Australian professor and I went, hang on a second, this is different to what I was taught when I was growing up.

And that opened my mind to a whole different aspect of the world.

And so when I decided to stay in Australia, really, I fell into sales and business because I required a way to earn some money and I found a job that I could learn how to do, going door to door doing sales and commission only, which a lot of people think that's like the most difficult thing in the world to do.

But I actually found that there was a system to it.

And so this was the very early stages of me thinking in systems.

I went, oh, hold on a second.

I, if I do this, this, this, this and this, I got my checklist and a percentage of the time this is what happens.

Great, let's just keep doing that and make the numbers work.

And then 18 months later, I started the company and started recruiting, teaching people for myself.

So I've lost track of the question you asked me now, so feel free.

To rev you got here because I know you started your first business at 21.

So it was right after school.

Then you managed a national Salesforce of over 300 people.

So you got in there, basically had to keep learning new things as you moved along.

So you've got this, you know, 25 year plus career of doing this.

How have you seen it evolve from when you started to where we are today and think pre 2020Pre pandemic to the transition.

How technology, how AI?

Where are we today?

What's it take to be successful today?

So that's a really awesome question.

And I think what it takes to be successful today is exactly what it took 25, 30, 40, 50 years ago.

The difference is in the methodologies that are available to us to apply the successful actions that are involved.

So, you know, we have AI today.

We have wonderful things like Zoom, which allow us to meet virtually online and have an in person or close to an in person conversation.

So we have tools that make it easier.

But at the same time, the successful actions and the successful attributes necessary to achieve success are no different today to what they were 20, 30, 40, 50, even a hundred years ago.

Books that are really well known, having been tried and tested and proven to be accurate and true 60 years ago, those things still apply today.

That's, I think, the best way I can respond to it.

You know, right.

Right now, there are people out there that are creating all sorts of success for themselves.

And while they may not necessarily be aware of what they're doing, when you really get under the hood, they're following the same principles that people did 50 years ago.

Yeah.

Not much things have changed, but not much.

The decision making process still pretty much the same, isn't it?

Yeah.

Well, we have the amazing ability to now market in a way that creates more inflow of interest.

So maybe not so popular anymore are the days of cold calling.

I cut my teeth going door to door.

That's not very common today, which I think is a shame, because while some people get annoyed by it, it teaches amazing skills.

When you go out and you know you are dealing with the hard knocks, you're getting told no.

You're refining the way you approach people.

It really teaches you quickly how to interact with people in a way that gives you the best chance of success.

Yeah.

One of the biggest challenges that business owners, entrepreneurs, salespeople, and people we work with and coach and listening on our podcast have is there's five generations of buyers out in the marketplace now.

Actually, five of them.

I'm on the baby boomer side of it, but you're.

You got the millennials, the Gen X, the jet.

There's so many, I can't even keep track of them all.

Resistance and buying resistance is a common problem.

People run into it, so they're pitching constantly and then running into resistance, and it's getting saturated.

And there's a lot of what we would call pitch fatigue in the marketplace.

You developed a system, though, to identify in a process to identify resistance and maybe the cause of that resistance and how we can mitigate and overcome that.

Let's talk about that.

Yeah, that's a fascinating topic because that's what.

In 2005, I met a group of people that I now just refer to them as the research team.

And they were the first ones to introduce me to the concept of resistance.

And the way that they introduced me to it was not from the point of view of resistance in sales.

It was actually from the point of view of, hey, you create your own reality.

And so if there is a non ideal condition in any part of your personal or professional life, the real source of that non ideal condition is going to be something within you.

And we identified that what that was was some form of resistance within yourself.

Now, when we apply that to sales and growing businesses, the resistance that we have will create problems for us and it will also activate resistance in the people that we're talking to now, whether that's a prospect that I'm looking to understand, whether or not they have enough interest and desire in our product, or whether it's me talking to one of the members of my team or even my wife.

If I have resistance within me.

Yeah, that resistance can and will activate resistance in the other person.

And if we're not aware of that, that becomes a real deep wormhole that we run down.

That's interesting.

You use the word activate and which means we've triggered it and we trigger that response, that negative response based on us and how we're doing it.

I know you developed the success predictor profile, I believe is what you developed with your research team.

And I know you talk about blind spots as entrepreneurs, as salespeople, we all have a blind spot.

And I agree with you a hundred percent.

We don't see our own selves.

We have to observe our ourselves.

How does the tool identify that?

And can you give us an example of somebody maybe prior to using the tool?

Once they use the tool, what was the transformation?

What were the outcomes after that?

I could give you lots of examples, but probably the easiest thing for me to do is actually talk about myself in 2005, when I first completed an early version of the Predictor profiles in 2005.

And at the time, I'd been running my business for almost 10 years and I had lots of great highs and loads of success.

But then it seemed to be a pattern where we'd have these awesome successes and then I'd hit the wall and it just, everything would collapse in.

I was like, oh man, get myself Back up, dust myself off, and find a way to go over or around or under the wall or, you know, attempt to slam myself through it.

Done occasionally, right.

And every time that happened, I kept going, man, like, what's wrong here?

This.

Is there something wrong with me?

Am I not cut out for business?

I just.

How are all of these other people with seemingly super successful businesses, what are they doing that that I'm not?

What do they know that I don't know?

And when I first met the research team, I was at a real low.

And to give them credit, this one guy, his name was dez, and he was the first person in my life who I'd spoken to about, you know, getting some help or getting support in my business.

I'd hired business coaches before, and they all seemed to make my last more difficult rather than easier.

And he was the first person who he really completely sat and listened and he made sure that he understood what I was saying.

And he asked very pointed questions and I felt safe to talk to him.

And at the end he said, all right, well, look, I'm pretty sure I can help, but before I say yes, definitely, I want you to complete this set of questions.

And so I went away and completed, filled out the forms.

And this was back in the day before we had it all online.

I actually colored in my answer A, B, C or D. And I colored in and then faxed it back to him.

Right.

And when I went to his office to then have what we now call a strategy session where we're going to look at the 49 factors of success that get measured by the predictor profiles.

When I confronted my results, there were a lot of things that it showed about me that I was not proud of.

There were a lot of things that it said about me, where I went.

I knew I maybe had a little bit of a problem there, but I didn't realize the problem was that severe.

I didn't realize that it was that much of a out of tolerance situation.

And, you know, in the moment I had a choice.

I probably could have argued with him and told him the tests were wrong and that this was just ridiculous.

And I'm not like that.

And.

But I knew that what it was showing, if somebody had those results, they were probably going to have some problems in life.

And some of the problems that they were going to have, they were probably the problems that I was having at the time.

So it was kind of.

All right, well, Mike, you got a choice here.

You either step up to the plate and be brave and honest.

And confront this and see if this person can help you, or you keep going down the road and hitting the wall again and again and again.

Sorry.

When you go through those assessments to identify some, let's call them, some flaws or areas that need focusing or working on and coaching on is there are commonalities, do you see things that are very common?

In other words, if you're doing 100 of these, are you going to see this shows up 80 times, 60 times, and then how is it mitigated?

Do you see things like that?

So I would love to be able to say yes.

And the real response to that question is that every single person is a unique individual.

So if I give an overview of what the assessments measure, it's kind of like looking at a person through the analogy of a helicopter.

And in this analogy, the person who's completing the assessments is a pilot of their own private helicopter.

As a pilot, they're going to have an amount of training that they've been through and they will have strengths, weaknesses and blind spots.

So they'll have aptitudes or lack of aptitudes.

Right.

We want to identify what all of those are, and everybody's weaknesses and blind spots will be different.

But we also then want to look at this helicopter that that pilot is piloting.

Is the helicopter operating within its design tolerances.

Now, as a simple analogy, the way a helicopter works is you've got a big rotor at the top that provides lift and steering.

Right.

It sits on a gimbal.

Now, that big rotor is representative of general competency in humans.

And our research has shown that there are seven traits that make up general competency.

And those seven traits have a, you know, they have a tolerance that we want them to be within.

They have a level that we want them to be above in that case.

Right.

Now, those traits are traits like focus, concentration, communication, self confidence, motivation.

Right.

Now, if person's general competency traits are within tolerance, then that means that that big rotor is going to perform exactly the way that they've been trained, that it will, it will provide the lift, they'll be able to steer.

They'll feel confident sitting in the pilot's seat that they can go from A to.

And they'll use the right amount of fuel to go from A to B.

Right?

Right.

But if those general competency traits are out of tolerance, if they're too low, well, then all of a sudden we might have problems getting enough lift, we might have problems steering, we might fly from A to B, but we might use double the fuel.

Necessary to get there.

And in a worst case scenario, we're actually going to crash.

So identifying if there are blind spots in general competency is super important because if we can identify that, we can help someone change that.

Now, when that big rotor spins, there's a small rotor at the back, because when the big rotor spins, the whole machine wants to spin on that same axis.

The small rotor at the back creates something called anti torque.

So it stops the whole machine from spinning.

Right.

In human terms, that's representative of attitude and integrity.

And there are five traits that make up attitude and integrity.

Now, the role of that little rotor at the back is to create stability and balance in flight.

So attitude traits are traits like critical, negative, blame, dishonesty.

And so by the name of the traits you'll probably see, we want them, the lower they are, the better.

So if somebody completes the assessments and their attitude traits are all within tolerance, then that means that as the pilot, they're going to have a really easy time flying this machine.

But if those traits are out of tolerance, if they go too high, all of a sudden, as the pilot, you're dealing with instability, you're dealing with being out of balance, you're dealing with issues that come up and your internal responses to those issues.

And that creates problems for you.

And so we get a holistic view.

And, and look what my results showed back in 2005 was that I had some attitude problems, I had some competency problems.

My listening score was 0, my patience score was 0.

My compet competitive score was a hundred.

Like I was on a road to not being able to see win, win, win, right?

And so approaching interactions through the point of view of how do I win.

But that's a problem because for me to win, my mindset back then was that means everybody else has to lose, right?

So I was on a road to failure.

I was on a road to having a really unsuccessful life.

And that was confronting at the time.

And then you coach on those behaviors and then we have to fix ourselves.

So for instance, if whatever our natural tendency is, it's to get that awareness.

So we shine a light to it, illuminate it, and then once we have awareness that we can go, oh yeah, I do this, like, as you mentioned, certain things, I'm, I'm sure I did the same thing.

I used to basically just come in and bulldog with my personality in order to make it work, right.

And I remember one time I went to see a, I wanted to get in the sales training business back in my early 20s.

And I went to see a top sales coach person.

I thought, hey, I'm.

They're going to be so happy to meet me, you know, I know it's done.

Well, I did door to door.

I've done things which, you know, make it happen or you're not eating.

And after 45 minutes he says to me, why would I hire you?

He goes, you're the worst salesperson I've ever met.

And that was brutal.

That was, it was just awful.

And so I asked him why?

And he says, all you've done is talk about you, your, what you're doing, you're about you.

He goes, what can you tell me about me?

Can you tell me about.

I said, I can't.

He goes, if that's it.

So it was really about inquiring and questioning.

And then I remember reading one of Stephen Covey's habits.

I think it was number five, seek first to understand, then seek to be understood.

And that just clicked for me and it was like, now I don't present solutions at all until I have full understanding.

And understanding me, I had to focus on the skill of inquiry, asking questions, which helps us.

And I think you'd agree with that.

As I'm reading your background, I'm going, holy cow, we've done a lot of things at the same time.

So I.

Sounds like it.

Yeah.

Well, one of the areas that you work with is you do accelerate sales and for professionals and companies and organizations, you have executive level sales coaching for salespeople who are already, already good at doing things, they're already productive, they're great and often that's how do we do better?

How do we even get better?

And some of the ways in which you do that, because a lot of times we earn a certain amount of money, we think, I've arrived, I got a nice comfortable lifestyle.

But there's always more to give, isn't there?

There's always more room to grow no matter where you are.

I've seen salespeople making 100,000 a year go to 300, 300 to 700, 700 to 1.5 and you think, how is this possible?

How can I 10x?

Yeah, we all have the same amount of time.

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And now back to my conversation with Mike Irving.

So one of the things I was very interested in is what you call the psychology of effortless selling.

And that one was resonating to me.

Can you unpack that one a little bit?

So again, I'll tie this into what we were just talking about.

I, when I first met the research team, I did the test myself.

One of the things it said was that I actually didn't understand sales.

Yeah.

And, and I'd been teaching sales for 10 years.

Right.

I was going, boy, this is really difficult to confront.

Like, hold on a second.

Yeah.

And so I engaged in what ended up being initially a six month coaching program to help me improve.

And they did exactly what you were just talking.

They just sat and asked me questions.

They didn't tell me anything.

They didn't present the solution.

They just sat and asked me questions.

And I, I saw so many ways where I was over talking, I was over telling, I was convincing and persuading and I went, man, I can really see that that's a failure.

Now that's a summary.

What we actually did in that process was they helped me uncover the subtle resistances that were going on in my energetic and thought space and emotional space that was causing me and restricting me from being able to do what I knew was probably the best thing to do.

Right.

Right.

And so after the first six months, I actually walked away from the business I'd been running for 10 years.

I shut it down.

I took a year off.

I went and reevaluated everything about my life.

I spoke to some of my really close colleagues about some of the things that I'd learned.

And a year later I went and sat down with that team again and said, right, I know my life's totally different and I know it's different because of you, but I don't understand how you did that.

I've attempted to talk to some friends, and they don't get it the way I get it.

That means that either I don't understand it well enough, or there's a way that you helped me that I don't understand how you did that.

And so I asked them if they would mentor me.

And what we created together, based on my 10 years of sales training, recruiting, teaching people, and their 50 years of research into what really makes people tick, what really drives decision making, we documented a system for how do you sell in a way that mirrors the way the mind of your prospect works?

And the first component of being able to implement that system is being willing to inspect your own resistance and then working on your communication skills.

So my definition for sales, sales is effective communication towards action and commitment.

And if I give an extended definition, I will say it's sales is effective communication between two parties, the end result of which is that both parties make commitments to take actions that provide benefit to both parties.

And when you really look at communication, I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said the biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred.

That's very real to me.

Yeah, because a lot of the times we say things and we think, well, I said it.

I told them they ought to know that now.

But we didn't actually check to ensure that they understood.

And that takes extra time, which is why we don't often do it.

But we'll always be unhappy to spend the extra time later when we've realized that they haven't understood.

And so when people become a part of our community, one of the things that every single member of our community goes through is really intensive training on communications.

How do we ensure that there's understanding in every conversation we have?

How do we ensure that the data transfer from one terminal to another actually.

Occurs in the green room ahead of time?

You asked me a clarifying question, so you want to talk on that?

And we just kind of went into it.

So you fed it back to me, which, you know, which is a good practicing.

And I kind of grew up with the features and benefits approach where we were telling you all about it, and here's how you're going to it.

And where I've evolved to now is, again with that seek to understanding, why are they doing what they do and what is the motivation for them?

And so I always get to motivation before I even get somewhere.

One of my favorite questions, I don't know if you have a great question for that.

But one of my favorite questions is if I was meeting with you as an executive, quick little, you know, shaking hands, saying hi, little quick few minutes of rapport building, then I might say to you, hey, thanks so much.

We're not necessarily a fit for you in your organization.

That's why we're here.

The briefing.

In order to be able to provide maximum value, I prepared some questions ahead of time.

Would you be okay if I answered some questions?

Sure.

They usually always say sure.

And I'll say, I want you to imagine your business.

I want you to go out three years from now.

I want you to go out three years from today's date.

Now look back at the last three years.

What has to occur for you in your organization for you to be happy about your progress?

And then I shut up because there's really only three answers.

Number one is I don't know, which means I'm not forward thinking or visionary.

Number two, none of your business, which really doesn't come up very often.

And number three, they'll tell you and they'll here it is, here it is.

Here's what we want to do.

And now everything you now have to make your widget, your product, your service align with what that goal and objective is.

So to their motivation because that makes it.

Is that an approach that you would take?

Mate, that's a great question.

I love it.

One of the questions, anybody who meets with me for a let's have a discussion to see if we are a fit or if we can help you with something.

One of the first questions that I ask every time after we've built some rapport and there's a degree of comfort, one of the questions I'll ask is, so look, what is it that Joe said about me or what is it that you've seen about me or my organization online that's grabbed your attention and held your interest enough for you to want to meet with me today for an hour.

That's a great question.

And I find that that question goes directly to understanding what their pre existing thought process is.

If someone's meeting you, they already have a reason that they're meeting with you.

In the sales industry, we tend to use the term lead.

Right?

We've got a lead.

Yeah.

The failure that I see a lot of salespeople have is that they don't actually then allow the person to lead.

So if I'm meeting with the prospect success, meaning win win is I'm standing with that prospect on the side of a river.

Success is on the other side of the river, the other side of the river is where we get to a place where we've both made commitments to take actions that provide benefit to each other.

Right.

Right now, we can't just walk across the river.

It's too deep and flowing too fast.

So the only way to get across the river is to get across a series of stepping stones.

Those stepping stones are attention, interest, desire, action and commitment.

The failure that I used to make and that I see lots of salespeople make, is that we attempt to tell the prospect where those stepping stones are.

We attempt to tell the prospect about how great our service is and how it's going to help them with all these things that of course, they're interested in.

Right.

The problem is that that will work a percentage of the time, a small percentage of the time.

Right.

What works way more often is to make sure that you get the prospect to tell you where those stepping stones are, because they're the lead.

How do you see us proceeding?

How do you see us moving ahead if we were going to address this?

What action steps do you think are the number one priority?

Hundred percent.

What timeframe are you thinking you're looking to take action on this?

In.

There's so many questions to ask.

And one of the things that I put a lot of effort into myself is really training myself to when I have a moment where I want to say something, them, instead of saying it, ask a question.

Yeah, yeah, that's so much more effective.

And they will feel understood.

They will be understood.

And until someone is understood and feels understood, they're not going to be anywhere near as interested in you or what you're offering or the plan of action that you're going to present.

If they don't really feel that you've.

Understood them, yeah, we lose that.

And we don't know how to ask those questions.

And with our younger generations, it's like, you know, we always joke, boys today swipe right to meet girl, you know, or vice versa.

Young people, they, they don't talk.

And the men, the young men don't know how to ask questions on how to find out information.

And so we get into the telling mode, it's prescription mode, before we get into diagnostics.

And I always tell everybody, if you walked into the doctor's office and the doctor said to you, oh, hey, we know what you need.

Look at, look at all the pills I've got.

I got a black pill, a blue pill, a green pill, a yellow pill.

What kind of pill were you looking for?

You're going, I'm out of here.

Instead I want you to pee in a cop.

I want to do some blood tests.

What's bugging.

Tell me about your family history.

What's going on?

What brought you, what made you think you needed to come into the clinic?

What symptoms were you noticing?

What's your long goal?

What's your perspective on the.

It's all about the questions.

And based on my early experience with this particular sales trainer, we've since become friends.

We competed for a long time and.

But he put me on the right path.

Is it's really the art of the question and it's learning to ask those key questions, not that are meaningful questions and which questions and how to construct those questions.

And then as you're moving, and I know you teach this, the science of closing the sale without actually going to a hard close or hard selling is it really sells itself because the solution becomes evident if it's make sense.

I even call them a makes sense solution.

So, hey, based on those questions you gave me, Mike, there are two or three courses of action that make sense to me as my role as whatever my role is.

Which one makes, you know, solution number one, solution number two, number three, course of action number one, course of action number two, course of action number three, which one makes most sense to you?

And then shut up.

And it might be a combination of all three, could be a variation of that.

But everybody wants to rush to the close.

So we all saw that always be closing, you know, and it's really not that, is it?

No, yeah, I 100% agree.

It's not that at all.

In fact, we have a salesability test as part of our diagnostic tool.

And one of the questions that we ask is about that.

And a lot of people think that the correct answer is, yeah, always be closing, always.

But it's not.

It's like, you know, how often do you follow up with a prospect?

A lot of people go, oh, all the time, every day.

Make follow up calls.

No.

Part of elite level salesmanship is also paying attention to your sixth sense, your intuition, your gut feel, whatever you want to call it.

And when you put your attention on a prospect, if you immediately get the thought called nap, don't ring them, trust it, don't ring them.

Because there'll come a day where your attention's on that prospect.

You're like, I can't get them out of my mind.

Okay, I'm going to ring.

And you ring up and they go, wow, you've got.

I was just, I've been thinking about you for 24 hours.

Like, oh, cool.

Yeah.

That happens so often it's insane.

It's a vibe thing, it's an energy thing.

It's voodoo, it sells voodoo.

But it's good voodoo.

Right.

And it's the voodoo you do.

So it's.

And I believe there's what, 32 questions in that questionnaire from a sales ability perspective and which identify where we need to go.

And the insights.

What other kinds of insights do you get from those assessments?

Oh, man.

So the sales ability test itself is.

I think it's 50 questions.

And then the larger diagnostic, which is the helicopter analogy, that's 270 questions.

So it's substantial and thorough.

Yeah, yeah, It's.

It takes two hours for somebody to complete the whole thing.

And if you understand how to read those assessments, man, it gives you insights into all sorts of things about the way that person thinks and makes decisions and how they approach communication and whether or not they are too competitive or not patient enough or we get a full scale.

That really gives insight into what is blocking that person from being able to achieve what they want to.

Yeah, the combination of factors that determines our success in an engagement really comes down to the person's willingness to be completely open, honest and transparent with us and tell us how they really feel and what's really happening for them.

And if somebody does that, yeah, the information we can get from those assessments is quite phenomenal.

And then thankfully we've developed processes and systems and a framework that allows us to help someone alter their results so.

They have to be honest with their responses.

Don't kid yourself and not game it.

Don't try and game the system.

And you probably designed it to where it looks for gaming.

And it's yet 100%.

It's got five different inbuilt honesty, bravery, reliability and accuracy measures.

And it tells us if somebody attempts to gamify it.

One of the challenges we always see in our training and talking to sales professionals and organizations is they're good at sales, they're making a nice life.

And it's Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right.

They, they're earning a good living, they're making six figures plus they've got a nice car, they live in a nice home, they've got a good career going for them and they're.

They want to balance their lives.

They want.

It's a work life balance issue.

And they see earning more money as I got to work more.

And one of the feelings we see with sales leaders, I think, and executives is to say your Quota was a million dollars this year and you hit your quota.

So now I'm paying you a bonus, you're getting a nice point, you're happy.

So now I raise your quota to 1.25, give you a 25% bump.

Otherwise you don't bonus.

And you just finished working your butt off for the last year and you're exhausted and so maybe you don't work and so you slack off a little bit that year or not really worry about it.

Now you hit 800,000 and so now they lower your quota next year and now you hit a million and you.

And we get this peak and valley, peak and valley.

And I see this failing with sales organizations all the time.

How can we address that as leaders when we got a team that's already good at sales?

But we want to motivate them to go beyond just the money part of it or the motivational factors that will make and drive that behavior.

Yeah, it's fascinating because there's a part of that process that is the result of win lose thinking because you know, the business owner or the shareholders want to win.

And so they see somebody who's performed brilliantly achieve their quota and they go, we're going to up the quota next year.

So we'll motivate them to work harder and make.

Yeah, but that's actually backwards.

I think if people can think of it in terms of, okay, this person's worked really hard, they've hit their bonus, they've done really well.

How do we make sure that we actually are able to support them to continue that work ethic and improve their skills so that they can produce more and work even maybe a little bit less hard?

How do we help them?

Right, that's a win win.

Do you find that like that?

It's actually a great point you just made there.

I want to unpack that one a little bit.

One thing I've taught is with top sales performers is the better they get at their game, the less they actually have to work and the more they actually make.

And the analogy I use is I'll say show off hands how many made in your home and equity in the last five years?

He just, of course, most hands go up.

How much effort did you have to put into that one?

I said now, like, how much effort?

Like we go to work, we slave it out 40, 50, 60 hours a week trying to earn X.

We do nothing on this side of the fence and we make as much as we do in a year sometimes because of appreciation or thing.

So I'm saying so it can't be done and so we can create value while we're not related to effort.

And when you look at some of the top performers, so what is it that we can incorporate into our life?

That hey, we can work less and work be more effective?

Yeah.

I was talking to somebody last week and they earned 2 million bucks just from the playing on the stock market last week.

Yeah.

And that involved max an hour of their time.

Yeah.

So it's a lie that most people believe that in order to be successful or earn more money, I have to work harder.

Yeah, that's a lie.

If that was true, that would mean that everybody who works harder would be more successful and make more money.

And that's not true.

This is part of resistance.

See, one of the aspects of resistance is that it, it creates a situation where we old things to be true despite the fact that we have no evidence that they are in fact true.

We see that every day.

And it's super subtle.

Like it's, it is so subtle.

It's the subtlety that causes us to do dumb things.

And I see it all the time, including in myself.

We do dumb things.

Sometimes we do things that don't align with our own self best interest.

And that's caused by these underlying self subconscious ideas that we have that are very difficult to find but they cause issues for us, they cause us to do silly things, they cause us to make dumb decisions.

And when that happens in a sales situation, we've all experienced it where we're talking to a prospect and we say something and as soon as it comes out our mouth we go, oops, why did I say that?

You, you idiot.

Right.

We've all done it.

It's about being willing to confront that exists within our own thinking and doing the unseen work.

I often call it unseen leadership.

It's doing the work that happens behind the scenes on yourself to remove your own internal blocks, barriers and resistances that actually stop you from getting where you want to get to.

Well said.

Well, it's your eq, right?

It's your personal eq.

It's what we do.

And that's why it starts with awareness and paying attention to it.

And it's all about, we're all at different places.

How do you see as far as moving forward to be successful in today's marketplace?

You talk about a global marketplace.

It's competitive more than ever.

AI is going to add new elements to it.

Competition is going to come where we see it coming.

It's going to come from areas we don't see it coming.

How can we prepare ourselves as entrepreneurs, as business professionals?

What are some of the one or two concrete steps we can take today as action item?

Like when we get listening to this podcast, that I can start putting myself on the proper path.

And we'll put all your details into the show notes so that they can go in and contact you regarding the assessments.

But are there two or three things that, hey, I can start this today or tomorrow and it's going to improve my professional career?

There's two things that immediately jump to mind for me in response to that question.

The first thing is to continue to work on yourself and know that the absolute best investment you're ever going to make is an investment into yourself, your skills and your ability to think with clarity and intention.

And the second thing is your network building.

Your.

If I say it this way, I think one of the most successful things that anybody can do is building their network of advocates.

What's an advocate?

An advocate is somebody who gets to know you, like you, and trust you enough to advocate for you and look for opportunities for you.

And the more that you build your network of advocates and trusted individuals, you know, I've never, ever in my life seen an opportunity wandering around on its own.

Opportunities are always attached to people.

Right.

And so everybody's high on the horse of AI and automation right now, and it has its place.

Let's remember that it's a tool.

What is it a tool for?

It's a tool to help you build more relationships.

And if you focus on that, you're not going to go wrong.

Yeah.

AI is not going to take over the world.

There's still going to be humans out there and it's important that you're able to effectively communicate with them and build solid relationships.

Yeah.

And you said no, like and trust.

And like I said, I think AI is a great tool for that.

You have to have systems, you have to have process to manage all those relationships.

You know, my wife and I raised seven.

And then how do we keep track of them all?

And then we've got grandbabies and how to keep track of them all.

And I have to have a database just to do that.

Just a family, you know, and, you know, I'll name three kids mistakenly before I get to the right kid.

Sometimes it's just the way it is.

The tools are good for that and we want to embrace those tools because you will lose to someone who does.

So embrace them.

But at the end of the day, it's that EQ is That connection that you talk about and then making ourselves better.

And when you make yourself better, I think it comes with the territory.

When we're young, we can't be taught anything.

You know, it's like, and I know you get this, I ask audiences all the time.

Surehand.

Some of you read books, like how many you just read, work on your career.

You're in sales, professional selling.

It's shocking how many hands go up, meaning that they don't read.

And then I said, if I want to put you on the spot, I'd ask you what was the last book you read and what did you learn from it?

Which I don't go there because they can't tell me anyway.

And I'm going, you're in the profession, but you're not focused on continuing education improvement.

What if you went to a doctor, you know, 30 years ago, graduated med school and hasn't gone to taking a single course?

You really want that person?

Like, is that who you want?

And so we're not done.

You get glimpses of peace once in a while, right?

I call them glimpses because they're glimpses.

You can pause for a little while, but then it's got get right back on it and make yourself, you know, obsolete.

So you eat your lunch.

So you're continuously improvement disrupt yourself.

All right.

Yeah.

And it sounds like you've got a great program on creating that personal disruption and moving in the right direction so that we become leaner, meaner, and more effective in the marketplace.

Mike Irving, this was great, great insights.

I love the conversation.

Thank you.

Yeah, me too.

Thanks for joining us today.

Pleasure.

Mike, as you are listening to this episode, what is one idea that you've heard that has caught your attention and why does it matter so much to you?

And who is one person who you can share that with?

Either sharing this episode or just sharing that insight that occurred to you while you were listening.

Perhaps it is challenging your beliefs and pushing your limits so that you or your team can reach your highest potential or how your mindset can create your own reality.

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