Resources in this Episode:

Christine Schlonski [0:02]
Hi Gorgeous. This is episode number 052, and today we are having the amazing Mark Sanborn back on the show, and if you want to know how you can go from ordinary to extraordinary, this is for you to tune in.

Mark Sanborn [0:21]
Hi, this is Mark Sanborn, you’re listening to Heart Sells! Podcast with Christine Schlonski, enjoy!

Christine Schlonski [0:26]
And before we actually tune in, make sure you hop on over to christineschlonski.com, go to the menu and in the podcast tab, obviously you find all the show notes, all the links to Mark, the social media, all of his amazing books, but then there’s another amazing, amazing thing coming up for you called the Sales Mentality Makeover Masterclass, and this is already number 3. We had people taking the class, and they had amazing, amazing results in their life and their business. Because they were able to change their mindset. They were able to improve their sales, they were able to improve their money and wealth creation knowledge. So make sure when you’re over at christineschlonski.com, you also sign in by clicking into the menu, choosing masterclass, and sign up for the list so you get all the information and the links to the free online summit, where the amazing experts will be teaching you how you can take it to your next level and give you spiritual and practical steps how you can increase your sales, and create true wealth without losing your authenticity. In case you missed Mark’s bio here it is a nutshell, 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. I’m so happy he’s back today. And let’s tune in. Well, Mark, I’m so excited to have you back for the next episode of Heart Sells! Podcast, and you gave so much golden advice in the first episode. I’m so so excited about what our listeners can learn from all of you experience. So I would love to know what was that first thing you ever sold in your whole life?

Mark Sanborn [4:22]
Well, I mowed lawns when I was young to make some extra money, but most of the people whose lawns I mowed knew me, and liked me, so it wasn’t really a hard sell. They needed their lawn mowed, and they thought, you know, I was a decent enough kid. Really the first thing I ever sold was in college, I worked with a promoter who had speaker events, full day events. And I would go into a meeting at a car dealership, or a store, or a shop, and do a free 20 to 30-minute presentation, and then try to sell tickets to the event. And the idea was simply, that the better I did in my presentation, and the more excited I got people about hearing other much better speakers, the easier it would be to sell them tickets. And it was a straight commission job. And I loved it. Because, for me, the sales pitch is what I did best anyhow, and then is giving a little speech. And I was able to make money in my college years before I started speaking professionally selling that.

Christine Schlonski [5:24]
And do you think that has influenced also the wish for you to be on big stages, by by having that college job by seeing what’s possible out there?

Mark Sanborn [5:34]
It certainly fed the already existing desire because I already knew about big events and had been to some and so to be involved behind the scenes, other way being on the sales team gave me backstage access, I met some of my heroes like Norman Vincent Peale and Tommy Hopkins and Robert Schuller people, some of whom aren’t with us anymore today. But I was lucky because I was able to combine what I would have done for free with something that I got paid for.

Christine Schlonski [6:06]
Amazing. And do you remember how your first sale made you feel?

Mark Sanborn [6:13]
Well, you know, selling is like speaking, in selling you get performance review after every call, you know, and it’s not what you’re if you work for someone else’s not once every 6 or 12 months. But you find out from the prospect just as I find out from the audience how I did, did I do okay? Did I do well, did I do great? Do they want to buy from me again? Do they never want to see me again? Will they read my book, will they buy my book? So I always say that you’ve got to have a pretty healthy self-esteem to realize that selling and speaking, you get a performance review after every call or after every presentation. And of course, when you do well, you feel good. But one of the dangers is, is that you put too much self-esteem and how the audience or the buyer reacts to you. I used to believe that a great salesperson could sell anybody and a great story speaker could be a success with any audience. That’s not exactly true. Because you don’t control who you speak to all the time, nor do you control who you sell to. And there are some days when objectively I give a really great presentation. But for whatever reason, the audience wasn’t as receptive, maybe they just flew in and or are tired, maybe they had lost their luggage, maybe there was a late and I literally have spoken after layoffs were announced. So there are things that I can do to mitigate those circumstances with my audience, but I don’t control my audience and you don’t control your potential buyer or your prospect. So if you fail, you fail at that particular situation, you didn’t fail, you know, it’s temporary, and it’s not a mark against your abilities as a salesperson or as a person. That’s the other thing, don’t let your professional performance determine your worth, as a person.

Christine Schlonski [7:57]
Yeah, that’s, that’s so important. And I know that that when I started out in sales, it was really difficult to make that distinction. When somebody told me they didn’t want to buy, they didn’t like the product, to not take it in personally. So, how did you deal with that issue? Did, did you even have it? Or was it clear at the beginning that you could just separate those two things from each other?

Mark Sanborn [8:23]
No, I, it took me 10, 20, 30 years, maybe I’m still learning it because on a good day, I struggle with the same issues that everyone else does. I think, however, one of the things people need to remember is that selling is also a relationship game. And if the client doesn’t like you, or you don’t like the client, that doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily buy from, but if they don’t like you, they definitely won’t buy from you even if you have a good product or service. So you can’t get by on just the strength of the product or service, you’ve got to do the hard work of building the relationship. And at the end of the day, that’s based on being a interested in them and their needs. And if there’s a sales success killer is the self-absorbed salesperson who sees a prospect as a means to an end, rather than an opportunity to be of service.

Christine Schlonski [9:13]
So how did you do this rejection today?

Mark Sanborn [9:17]
Well, I was asked, you know, what could I have done differently? You know, I do a post mortem, you know, just like an autopsy. It says gruesome, but an autopsy helps the doctors understand why someone died, well post mortem helps you understand why you didn’t make the sale. And I have to be very clear on what I could have done differently, versus what I didn’t control. And there’s a minor but important nuance, it’s what I need to do differently next time, not who I was. But what I did. What we do is not who we are, obviously, who we are determines what we do. And I don’t want to become too psychosomatic and sound like a shrink. But if you made a mistake, to error is human, I think when you make the same mistake over and over and over, you’re getting some feedback that you haven’t really learned from all those mistakes that you made. But the way that you deal with it. I like you know, the idea that I don’t remember what football coach, maybe Nick Saban, when his team would have a bad play, they had a habit of just yelling, next, because the idea was, the game was still in progress. And they couldn’t mope around about the bad play. All they can focus on was the next play. So maybe it would be good once you’ve asked what could I do differently to then just say next, and get on to your next sales call or your next opportunity?

Christine Schlonski [10:39]
So you have so many things you are you are doing, like all your speaking gigs, your company, how do you handle to keep balance in your life?

Mark Sanborn [10:53]
First of all, nobody starts out balanced, you know? When I started speaking full time, and I was doing 220, 230 days on the road, I was single, I didn’t have a family. I had a lot of flexibility, and I was anything but balanced. But one of the things I’ve taught my clients and the folks that I have mentored and coached over the years is that long term balance requires short term imbalance. The danger is when you are never are able to rearrange your life and become balanced. And you don’t want to sacrifice the most valuable things in your life for success. You don’t want to sacrifice relationships and health, those are primary. And if your relationships are suffering and your health suffering, that’s again feedback that you should reevaluate what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. But you know, I believe in time sovereignty, time sovereignty says we’re not completely balanced, you know? If there are six areas of your life, you know, work, recreation, relationships, you know, health, spiritual and miscellaneous. If you take those six things, and you balance them, that means you divide 24 hours by six, and that you spend that mini that that same number of hours on each of the six. Well, nobody does that, you know, eating requires maybe a total of 90 to 90 minutes to 2 hours a day. If you balanced you’re eating with the rest of your day, you know, it would be hours and hours. So what you do is you say, how much time do I need to invest in my health? For me, it’s 45 to 60 minutes working out six times a week. How much time do I need to invest in study? I was trying to spend one to two hours a day reading and researching and study. And, then what you do is, is you arrange your schedule so that you can give those different amounts of time-based on priority and value to those different activities. And that’s how you achieve what we typically call balance. But what I call time sovereignty.

Christine Schlonski [12:54]
Yeah, amazing. So, what is the best question a person could ask themselves to figure out more of their own potential? Because we all run with our own blinders, and often we do not even see how great we could be. Where’s a good point to start to figure out what better questions to ask so we can grow faster or more efficient?

Mark Sanborn [13:25]
I don’t believe we know our ultimate potential, I believe we all know how good we’ve become. But none of us know how good we could be. So when I talk about pursuing your potential, I just talked about getting better or bettering your best, because I can’t tell you what the number is of my potential earnings because I’ve chosen one of any number of professions. I can’t tell you what my potential health should be given, you know, my lifestyle. I just know that in all the important areas of my life, I could be better. And the way that I like to get people thinking about potential is this, I say if today, God or someone who’s all-knowing said to you, this is as good as your life is ever going to be, tomorrow, it’s all downhill, your relationships are going to suffer, you’re going to be less healthy, less happy, have fewer rewarding experiences, would you be happy? And of course, I’ve never met anyone that said, sure, that’d be fine. So I say so what plan do you have to make sure that doesn’t happen? Because when I wrote my book, The Potential Principle, we did some research and found that 58% of the people we surveyed said they had a commitment to getting better, but only 30% had a plan. And I think that a commitment without a plan isn’t a true commitment. I think it’s wishful thinking. So if you don’t have an intentional plan, a process of getting a little bit better every day, of going to bed a little bit smarter than you went to bed the night before, chances are you won’t accidentally get better. The only thing that gets better accidentally with ages wine, the rest of us have to work at.

Christine Schlonski [14:58]
Wonderful, that’s actually a wonderful finish off this episode. So people can find you at marksunburn.com, and I will put all the resources in the show notes including your books, your YouTube channel, and where people can get even more inspiration. Because as you said, you spend one to two hours a day with research and learning. If everybody would do that, we would definitely reach a higher potential. Thank you so much for being here and have a wonderful day.

Mark Sanborn [15:30]
Thank you, Christine!

Christine Schlonski [15:32]
I’m always so inspired and also curious about the stories what my podcast guests sold for the very first time in their life and how they felt. And I love how Mark described his story. So beautiful, and also how everything came together in actually working for other people for other amazing speakers, having the opportunity to be backstage and to learn. And I’m quite sure each and every one of us has one of these stories. And if you have not yet found your gift, if you have not yet tuned in a 100% go back in your life and see where did you do things that might be useful for you right now. For example, my over a decade sales career over the phone, help me now in my business to support people with their sales, and selling from the heart has helped to create this podcast and so on and so forth. Hop on over to christineschlonski.com, in the podcast tab you will find all the information for the show, all the links to Mark and his amazing books, it’s only a click away. And also make sure you sign up to the masterclass, which is the Sales Mentality Makeover Masterclass number 3, and this is gonna teach you even more how you can have spiritual and practical steps to increase your sales and create true wealth without losing your authenticity. Thank you so much Gorgeous for tuning in, for listening. Have a wonderful day wherever you are in this beautiful world. And I hope you are listening to the next episode. And I hope that I see you on the Sales Mentality Makeover Masterclass. Have a wonderful day wherever you are in this beautiful world and bye for now.