Christine Schlonski [0:02]
Hi Gorgeous. This is episode number 157. We have the amazing Steve Faber back on the show, who will talk more about bringing love into business.

Steve Faber [0:13]
Hi, this is Steve Faber and you are listening to Heart Sells! Podcast with Christine Schlonski. Enjoy.

Christine Schlonski [0:21]
Well, I am so over the moon today to have Steve Faber back on the show. We talked in the last episode about love turbo charges your business and today we are diving deeper. Steve Faber is the best selling author. He is the founder and CEO of the Extreme Leadership Institute. And as I already said, we both have one big word in common that seems in business a scary word, and that is called love. With his Extreme Leadership Institute, he helps companies, clients develop award-winning cultures and achieve radical results. The Institute’s team has helped over 20 companies earn a ranking on the best place to work less. Then Steve is back with his new book. So let’s dive in. I was so excited, Steve to have you back on Heart Sells! Podcast, welcome.

Steve Faber [1:18]
Thank you. Thank you.

Christine Schlonski [1:20]
Yeah, I loved everything about our first interview where we basically talk love all the time and that, having that piece in your lifestyle, in your business that it will be darn good business, right?

Steve Faber [1:37]
That’s right or damn good business.

Christine Schlonski [1:39]
A damn good business.

Steve Faber [1:40]
Depending, I don’t want to offend anybody sensibilities but you know, that is the title of the book.

Christine Schlonski [1:48]
That is the title of the book. Yes, so true. So people should get that amazing book. It’s going to be a fun read and it also is going to show you where you can kind of improve. Giving you different ideas on how to see business and how to make more business because at the end of the day, we have to face it, if we don’t sell, we don’t have a business, we have a hobby. So for all the amazing people listening, it’s a great gift. The more you give, the more you serve, the better your business will be. So it’s an important piece to work on, right?

Steve Faber [2:23]
Yeah, absolutely. When you do the work that I do, which I’ve been doing now for quite some time, and the core of your message is love, which it is, it’s the core of my message. I’ve been teaching this to the most hardcore of hardcore business people for quite some time now. I’m very cognizant of the fact that it’s easy to have kind of a knee jerk reaction to it that says it’s that California touchy-feely who hot crap. So here’s the thing. If I could be presumptuous as to quote myself. Love is just damn good business. This is about business. I’m a business guy. Am I a bit of an idealist? Sure. But I’m not naive. And I’ve been in the trenches, and I’m speaking business person to business person. So when I say that, that love leads to great business. I don’t say that lightly. So just to be really clear, I’m not talking about love as a sentiment, we’re talking about love is a practice and as a discipline, right? So it’s not enough just to walk around with the warm feeling in your heart. The question is that we all have to answer whether we’re salespeople or C-suite executives or contributors on a team wherever we are, or solopreneurs for that matter. The question always should be something like, how can I better show my customers, prospects, team, colleagues, whatever, that I love them. How can I show that better? What can I do differently that proves that that’s true? And that’s going to have to implicate, if I answer that question, it’s going to have implications on everything that I do as a business person, everything from the kind of people that I hire, the kind of joint ventures that I enter into, the kinds of processes and procedures and policies and approaches, the kind of messaging that I have. All of that comes into play. If I’m and this is the phrase I like to use, operationalizing love. Putting it into practice is a way to give ourselves a distinct competitive advantage in business.

Christine Schlonski [4:48]
Yeah, I totally agree. So you just mentioned that you taught that to so, so many people like what were the hardest people to teach that to?

Steve Faber [5:01]
Yeah, you know, what’s really interesting is, I haven’t found a category or an industry that is more resistant to that idea than any other. I’m talking about industries that you wouldn’t typically think would be amenable to this idea. For example, I’ve done a lot of work in the construction industry. Okay. I think about your stereotypical construction guys. You know, guys, most, unfortunately, in that industry, it’s very heavily male-dominated. These are, you know, a lot of blue-collar folks a lot of and, and the other end of the spectrum, a lot of engineers, right. And it’s all about steel and building things and that, you know, that’s the stereotype. These guys get it. They totally get it. They love what they do. They love building great projects. They love having an impact on the community. They love, they love seeing the results of their work and in this incredibly tangible way. They get it. I haven’t found an industry or a type of person that doesn’t. Engineers, scientists, construction people, and, and I’ve just seen it over and over again. So here’s the conclusion that I’ve come to. Okay. Most of us, I can’t prove this scientifically, by the way, but anecdotally, I can feel pretty confident in saying, most people already understand that love is good business. Most people get it. They have that, you know when you sit down and just talk it through. Do you think it’s a good idea for your customers to love you? Yeah, I think it’s a good idea. Do you think your employees perform better when they love working here? Yeah, absolutely. Right. You get that. So most of us are already there, but the problem is that most of us think that most of us don’t think it’s true.

Christine Schlonski [7:08]
That’s interesting.

Steve Faber [7:10]
There’s this collective thing that says, “Well, I don’t want to be the person to say anything about that, because I’m the only one who feels that way.” So what I’ve learned, Christine is that I’m not in the business of convincing anybody of anything. I’m in the confirmation business, not the convincing business, that when given the case, for love as a business practice, and given lots of examples, which I spell out in the book, you know, many, many examples. Really, what it does is it gives people permission to act on impulses and instincts that they’ve already had, in ways that they haven’t manifested before because they thought something was wrong with them for feeling that way and most of us are walking around like that. So it’s been pretty surprising and I’ve had this, this was surprising at first when I saw the response that I got to this, and by the way, that doesn’t mean that the initial response isn’t, you know, a lot of eye-rolling and skepticism, but they typically get alleviated within the first minute or two, after beginning to think of this from a business perspective. I’ve had conversations about this topic, talk with businesspeople, help them to practice this in virtually every culture in the world. So not just business culture, but country culture. So I’ve had several opportunities to speak to multinational audiences I spoke, you know, I was in Hamburg last year. I spoke to the international conference for Rotary International. So there are 10,000 people in that room from 185 countries talking about this subject. It is cross-cultural, it’s universal. If you are in the category of human being, which most of us are. I just don’t find any kind of universal resistance to this and in fact, I find universal acceptance. And then the hard part is putting into practice.

Christine Schlonski [9:18]
Yeah. What if we would turn it around, wouldn’t we want to feel loved by somebody who we buy from or do business with?

Steve Faber [9:27]
So of course, yeah, I mean, when you start to ask the question in that way, it’s almost ridiculous. It seems almost ridiculous that anybody would have any kind of problem with this idea. For example, I’ll ask the question, a variation on that theme. Let’s say you work, you’re on a sales team, you work for a big company, you’re on a sales team. Do you think Christine that you’re going to be more productive if you enjoy the people you work with and the work that you’re doing, or if you’re miserable, what do you, what would you prefer? Hmm,

Christine Schlonski [10:07]
That’s really a hard question.

Steve Faber [10:13]
It’s just turning up the heat. All right? Well, so do you think you’d rather, would you rather love what you do? Or would you rather be okay with it? I’d rather love what I do you think you’d do better at work? We sure would. Of course, I would. Because we know it’s true. So this is nothing new. It’s nothing new. What is new is calling it out. And being conscious and intentional about putting it into practice. That’s what to do.

Christine Schlonski [10:37]
Yeah, I totally agree. So do you remember in all of your careers or even before that, what was the very, very first thing that you have ever sold?

Steve Faber [10:49]
Oh, boy. I’ll tell you exactly what it was, exactly what it was. But I have to give you a little context for it. I started out as a musician. That’s what I was going to do with my life. And I got married and had kids really young and quickly came to discover that being a musician and feeding people were going to be mutually exclusive pursuits. So that’s when I got into the business and I had a friend who was in the commodities futures business. So selling very speculative investments. And I started to learn the ropes. I got hired by a company as district sales, you know, straight commission. Selling options on precious metal futures. This was back in the late 80s. And Christine, not only do I remember that first job that I had selling, but I remember the first sale I ever made. It was all on the phone. It was all cold calling. I sold a $2500 option on the silver to a woman named Pat. I don’t remember her last name, but I remember her first name. And when I hung up the phone after that first sale, get the cheers from the office to my manager, I got my name on the board. I felt awful. I felt like I had just ripped out a chunk of my soul and traded it for a commission on a $2500sale. And the reason is, it was a horrible investment. And I knew it was and she knew there was no sleight of hand, there were no false promises. She knew it was money that she could potentially lose. That part I was okay with. Honest, transparent you can lose it all. But I knew that it just was, I had a moral dilemma with the product that was sold. And that, ironically, was my first experience in the business that I ended up really focusing on. So within a couple of years, I had my own commodities brokerage firm. I had my own sales guys, sales team selling speculative investments to people. And that’s where I learned about business. That’s where I learned what it means to lead and to build a team and the market and to do all that. I was a sales manager as well as an entrepreneur. But the problem was, still the problem was the same. I hated that business. I had a moral dilemma with my own business. So one of the ways that I learned how important even before I was able to articulate it, one of the ways that I learned how important love is in business was by experiencing the lack of it in my own business many, many years ago, this was the late 80s. I got out of that business and eventually found a new path that led me to where I am today. I know from the absence of love as a sales guy, how important it is to have it. Anybody who’s listening right now, as I mentioned earlier. If you have that kind of churning in your gut when you sell something that you think this isn’t right somehow, it’s not going to serve the customer in a way that that they think it is. You’re in the wrong place.

Christine Schlonski [14:41]
Yeah, totally agree and that’s kind of like Wolf of Wall Street thing that people are so fearful of. That holds them back all these ad sales movies like Boiler Room, Wolf of Wall Street, ABC, Coffee is for Closers.

Steve Faber [15:01]
That’s the place from whence I came.

Christine Schlonski [15:05]
That is what hearts and that person have a big issue with. Not on a conscious level necessarily. But we all have made some purchases that we regret. And we have all had situations where something was promised that wasn’t delivered, or that really did hurt us because we didn’t get what we thought we’re going to get. And that leaves this negative feeling. And when we now have our own business, and we want to be that good person, and we want to bring love in the equation, then we definitely don’t want to be like these people, which then subconsciously kind of is in the way because we don’t see that we have the choice not to be like them. Put it in the same like sales is and then the memory of it.

Steve Faber [15:57]
Because in some way you’re equating an effective salesperson who has one who is manipulative and doesn’t care. And that’s just not true. There are people like to listen in every industry and every business, whether it’s sales or, or, or engineering or health care or whatever. In every business, there are people who are in it solely for themselves. just so happens that the sales business, there’s a stereotype that’s grown up around that, that’s what salespeople do is that they just try to get the sale no matter what. And the best salespeople that I’ve worked with, you know, when I’ve been on the customer end of things, you know, have become friends of mine over the years now, because I know that they had my best interests at heart.

Christine Schlonski [16:43]
Yeah, I totally agree. That’s when the magic happens. It’s not just that you sell more. It’s more fun. You feel better about yourself. And at the end of the day, you might have a bunch of new friends.

Steve Faber [16:55]
That’s right. It’s a good bonus.

Christine Schlonski [16:57]
That’s an awesome bonus. Yeah. So what can we give people like for actionable steps? So I heard that if you don’t love what you do, do something else so that you love what you do. Like, don’t sell something you don’t believe in. What else could people do if they feel kind of stuck in the same situation because they are afraid that they come across sleazy or pushy or salesy, what can they do?

Steve Faber [17:27]
I’m going to give you a very specific starting place, but not in terms of a list of things to do. But I want to give you a very specific question to ask yourself, to ask and answer for yourself, not enough just to ask it. So it’s something like this. Why do I love this work? Or you pick the context. Why do I love this work, this business, this company, this product, this customer? It applies in all the above. Why do I love this? You fill in the blank. And how do I show it? Why do I love this customer? How do I show it? It variation of the theme is. Let’s say the true answer to that question is, why do I love this company, for example. “Well, I don’t.” That might be an honest answer. So then you want to try a little variation on the theme, see if you can answer this question. What do I love about this company? Or about this work or about this product? So what this question is designed to do, first of all, is to help you light your own fire. To help you inspire yourself. Spiritually impossible to be a high performing salesperson unless you love it yourself first. So start with that. And this isn’t about convincing yourself of something that’s not actually there. It’s about looking for the elements that you do genuinely connect with love, or I’ll even accept care about in the beginning, right? We can, we can start with that Ember and fanned the flames over time, right? And then the second part, how do I show it is the part that demands that you begin to behave in a way that’s congruent with that. So what can you do differently? We talked about a couple of different examples. And again, in the book, you’ll read many, many examples of what this looks like. But what’s important is that it looks, that it’s authentic for you. So if you start to ask the question, How can I better show my customers or my prospects that I love them? What would you do differently if that were really if that’s really what you were doing? And be creative and see where that takes you. So what do I love about this How do I show it and see where that takes you.

Christine Schlonski [20:04]
Yeah, I think that’s applicable to every part of your life.

Steve Faber [20:11]
Absolutely. And it’s just damn good business.

Christine Schlonski [20:14]
It is. I just love it. Wonderful. Well, thank you so, so much. Is there anything else you want to leave the listeners with, besides get the book, and we’re going to give you the link again and put it in the show notes as well.

Steve Faber [20:30]
Yeah. So thank you for asking. I think it’s really important that we understand that even though we get caught up in our sales quotas, we get caught up in the phase that we have to get done and the list of we have to go through them and I’ve got plenty of lists myself on my desk at the moment. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that we have a huge impact on the way the world operates. And I really believe that if we can change the expectation and the experience of what it means to being business, of what it means to be salespeople, and what it means to be entrepreneurs, what it means to be business people overall, if we can change the experience into an expectation that this is about bringing ourselves fully into our work, doing work, that’s meaningful, having lives of joy. If we can change that in business, we change everything. We change everything. And that’s not an exaggeration. So yes, my hope is that by putting this into practice, you’ll make more sales. But I also think we have the opportunity to literally change the world for the better in the process. And that’s my invitation to all of us.

Christine Schlonski [21:43]
Thank you so much. I love that invitation. And I will make sure that the link, http://www.loveisgoodbiz.com/ is available for everybody. So people can check it out. And they also can do the assessment which I think is important, so they understand where they are, right? It’s like a map, you kind of get an idea where you are, and then you know where you want to go. So you can take steps to get there. And I’m sure your book will support that process as well.

Steve Faber [22:16]
Yes, thank you so much. I appreciate that.

Christine Schlonski [22:18]
Awesome. Thank you so much, and have a wonderful day.

Steve Faber [22:22]
Thank you, Christine. It’s been a pleasure.

Christine Schlonski [22:24]
Well, at the end of the day, Gorgeous, we all want to be loved and we all want to love. So I think this message of Steve Faber is so so important. And I’m so delighted that he’s teaching it for years and years and that our paths crossed. So because you know, the more people bring out that message that sales are love or businesses love, the better because now we can focus on the other party, we can really serve, you can do good in the world while we make money. Thank you so much for being here today. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. All the show notes, the transcripts, the amazing resources, the free assessment Steve offers are at https://christineschlonski.com/. Find the podcast tab and there you have all the episodes available with all the resources we talked about. And all the links to Steve are one click away. Also, you definitely want to tune into the next episode coming out on November 29. Friday, this Friday because we are celebrating one year of Heart Sells! Podcast. Heart Sells! Podcast started November 2018. And I’m so delighted to have been on this journey with you I am so grateful that you are here that you are listening. If you have not yet subscribed please do so. And please leave a rating and a review. This will help other, people, to discover the podcast when you share your love for the podcast. Thank you so much for being here. Have a wonderful, wonderful day wherever you are in this beautiful world. And I’m saying bye for now.