Resources in this Episode:

Christine Schlonski [0:02]
Hi Gorgeous. This is episode number 051 with the outstanding, top of the field leadership expert in the world, Mark Sanborn.

Mark Sanborn [0:13]
Hi, this is Mark Sanborn, you’re listening to Heart Sells! Podcast with Christine Schlonski, enjoy!

Christine Schlonski [0:17]
Mark is the president of Sanborn and Associates, and that is an idea lab for leadership development and turning ordinary into extraordinary. Globalgurus.org lists Mark as one of the top leadership experts in the world. Mark has given over 2,600 presentations in every state and 14 countries. He has authored 8 amazing books, more than 2 dozen videos and audio training programs. His programs are taught by Kreston International in 90 countries, and he is an adjunct professor at the University of Memphis. I will link all of Mark’s books into the show notes that you also find at christineschlonski.com when you hop on over there to go to podcast. And one of his amazing books is the Fred factor, how passion in your work and life can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. It was an international bestseller and was on the New York Times Business Week and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists, what an achievement! Mark is also a member of the Speaker Hall of Fame and is a past President of the National Speaker Association. To give you one more idea of who Mark works with, his clients include Enterprise Rent-A-Car, FedEx, Harley Davidson, Hewlett Packard, KPMG, Morton’s of Chicago, New York Life, REMAX Service Master, Costco, ESP and GM, IBM, John Deere, just to name you a few. So tune on today and see how we have the opportunity to pursue our potential each and every day, and to become the best versions of ourselves. enjoy! Well, I’m so excited to have you on today, Mark, thank you so much for being here on Heart Sells! Podcast

Mark Sanborn [4:49]
Thank you, my pleasure.

Christine Schlonski [4:54]
And it’s such a pleasure to have you I mean, you will have a really remarkable CV or bio, and you’ve reached a lot of your potential and you are about potential and leadership. And just for people to understand this is a podcast, where we support entrepreneurs to have it easier the sales, because of lots of people kind of tighten up or are afraid when it comes to sales. And you yourself had to overcome quite some challenges, because when you were at the age of 10, you lost the speaker competition, and today, you are part of the Speaker Hall of Fame, and you are a past President of the National Speakers Association, so from losing that competition to becoming that person, that leader in your industry that you are now can you give us a little bit background? Like what did you do, what you did you discover to step into that confidence space?

Mark Sanborn [6:08]
Sure. Well, I have a premise now many years later that although success is fun, we learn more from failure. Failure has a bigger emotional impact. And it challenges us to either fix the reasons why we failed or to stop doing what it was we failed at doing. And I was lucky because at 10, when I entered my first speaking contest in a youth organization here, I didn’t think it would be very hard. I was the kind of student that did well at school, and if it involves using my brain, I could usually think my way around a challenge. But I find out that public speaking was very different. And I made a fortuitous decision, and then I didn’t say you know what, this sucks, I’m terrible at it, I’m never going to do it again. I decided I wanted to figure out how to do it, that first last challenged me. So I started entering more and more competitions and studying other speakers and I started practicing more. And those skills also served me very well in selling, because my first job out of college actually I had a sales job in college, but my first full-time job was in sales and marketing. And to be honest, I wasn’t a natural at that either. Very few people are naturals at a skill set. And interestingly, I’ve observed that some of the people who are quote on quote naturals, never truly become great because it came to them so easily they didn’t work at getting better. You know, they were good enough to get by because they were naturals. They had a background or some innate abilities that help them succeed, but they never became the superstars. I find more often than not, the really successful people had to work hard to attain the level of mastery that they have today.

Christine Schlonski [7:52]
Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. I’ve never, I’ve never met like a natural born salesperson. Some kids seem to be pretty amazing and that.

Mark Sanborn [8:03]
That’s true, but maybe they grow out of it.

Christine Schlonski [8:05]
Yeah, they I think they kind of lose the tools when growing up.

Mark Sanborn [8:10]
Well they here no so many times, they just eventually figure out another way to get what they want without depending on mom or dad to say yes.

Christine Schlonski [8:18]
Yeah, yeah. So and as you know, as an entrepreneur, if you run your own company, it is so important that you make sales because without sales, you don’t have a business, you have a hobby. And you just said that you learned the selling part. So do you believe that everybody can learn how to sell?

Mark Sanborn [8:40]
I believe anybody can learn to do anything, I don’t believe I could learn to play basketball well enough to be a professional basketball player. But, I could certainly learn the game well enough to play a pickup basketball game with my friends. See, I think that’s where people get hung up on the ‘well, I just can’t’, if you really don’t want to, or don’t enjoy doing something, you most likely won’t become good at it. See, I wanted to be a better speaker and I enjoyed the process of getting better. But if I had way back when decided, you know, I really don’t care. I mean, it really isn’t important to me, I would have pursued something else. I think it’s important that we can all develop skills, but that we won’t all be in the top one or 5%. Selling is often referred to you hear you hear a cliche that nothing happens until somebody sells something. And while that’s true, I always add the idea that nothing happens until somebody has something to sell. One of the things I noticed with some entrepreneurs is that they’re really hardcore at selling, but the product or the service, or the experience they deliver isn’t commensurate, isn’t as good as their sales skills. You’ve got to have both a great product and a great sales and marketing effort, or you’re always going to be hidden in your efforts.

Christine Schlonski [10:01]
Yeah, totally. Because if you know, if your product is not good, your customers won’t return because they don’t have the experience they are looking for. So that’s true.

Mark Sanborn [10:12]
Salespeople should really look at, are they not succeeding at selling, or are they not succeeding, because they’re not selling something that really has value to the people that they’re trying to sell to? Either one of those things can curtail a successful sales career. The other thing I think that is often lost on especially newer salespeople, is they’ve heard another cliche, that’s not really true, and that is that selling is a numbers game. The more people you see, the more sales will make, that’s not true, selling is a skill and a numbers game. If you have zero skill, and you call 100 people, you’ll have zero sales. If you have 50% skills, and you call on 50 people, you’ll have 25 sales. So what you’ve got to do is both develop the skills and the frequency that will make you successful or in my book, The Potential Principle, I call it the fit technique. The technique is about frequency, intensity and technique, you’ve got to do all three, you’ve got to do what needs to be done frequently. You’ve got to do it with intensity, you’ve got to make sure that you’re using the right or the best technique.

Christine Schlonski [11:19]
Yeah, yeah. And you, you also have a book, it’s called, You Don’t Need a Title to Be a Leader, which I love the title. Among other amazing books like the Fred Factor, which was also a New York Times best-selling book on the list, and I know that lots of people just love this book. I will drop all the links in the show notes so people can check it out and and learn from you. So, when people become an entrepreneur, most of them start out in a small business like they are solo entrepreneur, or they have a VA or somebody who supports them, in some way, shape or form. And there’s often the big question like, I know what I’m doing, maybe I’m a coach, or I’m a therapist, and I have a great gift that I want to give to the world, but I’m not quite sure of the value. Because they perceive their own value that they deliver in a different way than maybe the customer would see it. Because they think you know, I’m starting out. I’m not a leader in the field. Nobody knows me yet. How can I price myself? How can I offer this gift to the world? What kind of advice would you have for people where to start when they are new in being an entrepreneur?

Mark Sanborn [12:43]
I don’t know of anybody that began their career as a leader in the field. It’s a process. And as we learn and get better, we are able to increase our fees. I think that for speaking especially, and perhaps to a lesser degree coaching and consulting early on, you need to establish your value by doing is getting in front of as many audiences or clients as possible. I spoke for free, far more often, early on, than I did for free. But one day somebody called me and said, I heard you speak at an event, by the way that was an unpaid event, what would you charge to come speak in our organization? And I knew that I was ready to charge something, I wasn’t ready to charge a massive amount, but that the client thought I was worth something. So I asked them what their budget was, you know, and I found out that what they had seemed fair to me, and I think the way that you pursue is you start with a fee that is relative to the field reasonable, you try as possible to be a good value, and you benchmark against what other people with your experience, in your field are getting, and then you work a little bit harder to deliver a better product or a service. And most professions, you know, we don’t sell as consultants in speakers and coaches and entrepreneurs, rarely are we selling a product. So we can’t say that you know, you can buy that product down the street for a little bit more, a little bit less. But if you’re familiar and you become a student of your field, you’ll know what entry level, established, and top end providers are getting for their services.

Christine Schlonski [14:20]
Yeah, yeah, I agree. So what I what I learned over the, especially the last couple of months, I had the conversation often that for somebody, their gifts, or what they do comes with such ease, that they don’t see the value in it. So when you established your speaking career, from the moment you kind of lost that competition and moved on and became better and better in your craft, speaking probably became more natural, and then starting to put a price tag on it, because you enjoy it and it’s easy, you get invited. Where do you start to, to put that price tag on it, before somebody else invites you and asks you about your fees?

Mark Sanborn [15:12]
Well, I think that’s a good question, and you need to know what are your deliverables, you need to be able to say to a client, for this much money, these are the three or four things that I’ll do. And what we all need to remember is what’s painfully obvious to us isn’t painfully obvious to others. You know, what is apparent to us, isn’t apparent to others. We’re basically, when someone, someone hires us to do something for them, they’re delegating thinking to us, they’re saying, you know, when it comes to leadership, or it comes to personal improvement, or it comes to selling, I need you to think about this for me, because I don’t have time I’m running a business, I have three kids, I have family commitments, and so you then say to yourself, what do I know that would be valuable for them to know? And I would go back to the idea that every profession has an association and I’m a big believer, obviously having served as the the President of the National Speakers Association, in becoming involved not just so you can get the community of other like-minded people or learn the craft, but so that you can understand the profession you’re a part of. People go through law school, so when they graduate, they know what entry-level lawyers are going to be offered to work. They know what the student that graduated, the top of his or her class is going to be offered, how much more, and there’s no profession that you and I can’t do the same thing. If we stay isolated, however, if we just don’t tap into the expertise of others, will make far more missteps trying to make it up on our own.

Christine Schlonski [16:41]
Yeah. So what was, when did you realize that you would need some support to craft your art?

Mark Sanborn [16:53]
Well, I’ve always been a student. So, you know, the support I received was from observing and asking questions and being involved in my association. I was probably, I’m probably gonna say I was eight years into my profession full time before I went to a speech coach, who I knew, I understood the nuances that would help me become better. It’s easy to become good pretty quickly. But it’s harder to go from good to great and even harder to go from great to extraordinary because the gains are more nuanced, and more incremental and require more effort. So I also at that point, my career had enough money to pay for this, at the time relatively expensive coach, who proved to be very valuable, because I still, you know, these many years later, after 30 plus years in the business, I still think back to some of the things that I learned from him. I don’t know that that will be careful of trying to spend money to replace legitimate learning. Nobody will do it for you, people will help you, they’ll support you. In my profession, people say, Well, I’m a great speaker, I can’t sell myself, I need somebody else to sell me. Bad news. If you can’t sell yourself, nobody else can sell you. Once you’re good at selling yourself, then maybe someone can sell you as well. But you’ve got to learn the process. So you understand how the client thinks, the criteria they use for hiring speaker what they like and what they don’t like. So one of the big miss, and I think it’s in all professions are the folks that have hung out a shingle to kind of help you get rich quick, they’ll do it for you know. No they won’t, they may have some ideas that will be helpful, they may encourage and support you and assist you. But ultimately, you’ve got to take responsibility for developing developing your career.

Christine Schlonski [18:44]
I just yeah, love it. That’s such great advice and such golden nuggets to to listen to this. Well, thank you so much for being on Heart Sells! Podcast and where can people find you?

Mark Sanborn [18:58]
It’s very easy, marksanborn.com, M A R K S A N B O R N.com, and all things related to my work, and my various books can be found there.

Christine Schlonski [19:09]
Wonderful. Thank you so much. And I’m happy to have you back for the next episode. Bye. I hope you got some inspiration out of this episode. I am always so inspired by my guests, and I’m so happy and honored to have them on Heart Sells! Podcast . Mark’s story is quite incredible, and he shows how you go from ordinary to extraordinary. So hope you took some notes. And I hope you are looking for ideas of how you can transform your life on to your next level. Shoot me a comment, leave me questions, and definitely make sure you hop on over to christineschlonski.com, in the menu, in the podcast tap you find the podcast with the show notes, the transcripts, all the resources, all of Mark’s books and social links so you can connect, it’s only one click away. And also there’s a tab for the masterclass, and you want to make sure you are signing into the Sales Mentality Makeover Masterclass number 3, where amazing experts will be teaching everything in regards to mindset, sales, money, and wealth creation, to take you to the next level for your life and your business. Thank you so much for tuning in. Listening to the next episode that will be following with Mark Sanborn as well. And for right now, I’m just wishing you a very wonderful day wherever you are in this beautiful world. And bye for now.