Subscribe to the Next Level BizTech podcast, so you don’t miss an episode!
Amazon Music | Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify | Watch on YouTube
Transcript is auto-generated.
Josh Lupresto (00:01)
Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of sales engineering at Telarus
And this is Next Level Biz Tech.
Everybody welcome back. We got a special episode for you today. So today’s episode is titled Stop Selling Start Serving and how other air quotes here how other centered selling wins every time. Today on with us though we got a special guest. We got Mr. Chris White author speaker trainer teacher. We’ll go into your background here in a minute. But Chris welcome on buddy.
Chris White (00:41)
Thank you very much, Josh. Very, very good to be here.
Josh Lupresto (00:45)
I love it. You got a cool background. for anybody that doesn’t know, Chris has got an awesome book out there, The Six Habits of Highly Effective Sales Engineer. You’re out there helping technical sellers elevate the craft. You’ve got some of these cool ideas, other centered selling. Just wanted to have you on. You you and I have had some good back and forth dialogue. I just wanted to have you on and talk about, kind of unpack that a little bit and where that came from. I think you got some cool stuff to share.
Chris White (01:10)
Yeah, yeah, no, I’m excited to be here and you know, you and I’ve had a few conversations offline and I think we felt like the record button should have been hit then. So I’m excited to have a conversation with the recording actually going.
Josh Lupresto (01:21)
Indeed.
Indeed, indeed. And it’ll be a much more positive conversation than our last one about Notre Dame football.
Chris White (01:30)
We will leave college football out of the conversation for the moment anyways.
Josh Lupresto (01:34)
I will state for the record, the committee is whack and they got it wrong and they gotta get it better next time. That’s all, we’ll just leave it there.
Chris White (01:41)
And I will state for the record that my, do feel for the Notre Dame fans, I went to a Catholic high school. I have a lot of Notre Dame friends and they are not happy, but I do have to make a shout out to my alma mater, JMU, AKA James Madison University, who sort of backed in to the playoff. think we’re not going to do well against Oregon, but we’re happy.
Josh Lupresto (02:02)
Yeah.
Hey, hey, you know, I love the ability that anybody can get in. You know, these guys hire the right people. We were talking about Cignetti. ⁓ I think it’s cool story. They deserve to be there.
Chris White (02:16)
Yep,
indeed, indeed.
Josh Lupresto (02:19)
All right, so before we get through this kind of other centered selling, for anybody that’s not familiar with you, walk us through a little bit your backstory. How’d you get into sales? What led into the engineering? And then you got into this kind of like teacher author thing.
Chris White (02:27)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So, so yeah, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll try to, to, to go through quickly. And, and, you know, I’ll age myself a little bit, Josh. I graduated from university in the early nineties as an IT professional. And I was an IT architect for about 15 years, did a lot of consulting with primarily the federal government. I’m based in the DC area. And, know, it’s interesting, Josh, I was about 15 years into my career, making more money than I thought I’d ever make as an IT consultant.
doing exactly what I thought it was that I wanted to be doing. And I was miserable in my job. I woke up every day hating to go to work. And honestly, I thought there was something wrong with me. Like, you’re making great money, you’re doing exactly what you studied to do. And you know, it’s interesting, I found a career, like a professional career development coach, and I went through his program. And he said, you know, Chris, there’s nothing wrong with you at all. You’ve just got talents and skills that need an outlet.
And you’re, probably feel like a cage tiger pacing back and forth because you don’t have an outlet for that. And he was a hundred percent right. So that gave me the courage to jump into sales as a sales engineer. I was an expert in a particular technology, got a job as a sales engineer. And as I like to say, Josh, I thought it was going to be brilliant because I can move a mouse and talk at the same time. Right. And here’s the truth.
Josh Lupresto (03:59)
Magic. Magic.
Chris White (04:03)
I had no idea. In fact, the first time I heard the words sales and process in the same sentence, I had no idea what they were talking about. Like there’s a process to sales. I got that. just showed up. sort of spewed our guts and either they liked us or they didn’t was a disaster at first figured it out became honestly the number one se in my line of business for five years running president’s club and all that moved into management and inherited a team.
discovered very quickly they were making many of the same mistakes that I was making when I first entered the profession. That was back in 2010. And I created a training program for my team then. And within the next couple of years, that team sequentially closed the big, first we closed a 300K deal, then a 600K deal, then a $1.2 million. And the CEO finally, after a couple of years, he was like, what are you guys doing? And I…
told him a little bit about the training I had done. And over the next couple of years, on top of my day job, and by the way, at that point I wanted to get the big bucks, so I moved into an account executive role. So now I’m on the sales side of the equation, but along the way I’d been asked to do training for other teams based on what I had done. And that’s why I really found the passion for coaching, for training and
Josh Lupresto (05:14)
Yeah.
Chris White (05:31)
At one point I realized if I’m ever going to do this professionally, I need to write a book and you’ll see a trend here. I actually found a publishing coach who helped me write the book and that was in 2019. I published the book within about six months. Some folks that run onboarding for Salesforce reached out to me on LinkedIn and said, Hey, we’ve discovered your book. We love it.
It’s going to become required reading for all new hires coming into this role. And by the way, can you send us 200 books? It was at that point where I thought maybe I’ve actually done something worth doing. And here’s where the story turns, takes an interesting twist. I took my last paycheck and launched this business full time in March of 2020.
Josh Lupresto (06:00)
Love it.
Hmm.
What could go wrong? What could go wrong?
Chris White (06:25)
Thought I’d made the biggest mistake of my life, survived 2020, the business really took off shortly after that. And here I am running this business full time. I train sales engineers, technical sales teams, the AEs and SEs together, and it’s just been a magical ride. So there’s my background in a nutshell.
Josh Lupresto (06:45)
I love it. You know, I think for a lot of people, writing a book is a really, you know, it seems like this big crazy, how could I ever thing, as you kind of went down that journey, I you mentioned you kind of got a publishing coach and all that good stuff, but what’s, I’m a big lessons learned guy. What is, what’s the biggest kind of, oh, I thought it was going to be like this. And then it turned out to be, you know, way more difficult or way more easier. Kind of what was a big aha for you when just that process.
Chris White (07:13)
Yeah. And it’s probably to answer that question is probably worth giving a little bit of context before. So I had actually tried to launch a business like this two or three years earlier. I actually bought into a franchise that that does something similar to this and just being very transparent with you and your listeners. I invested about 80 grand and I lost all but none of that came back to me in any way, or form.
And what I realized was that in order for me to be successful in this, it had to be my material. The reason that failed was because I was trying to buy into a system that was turnkey, but it just wasn’t me. And it’s interesting, Josh, I attended a sales conference at one point along the journey and saw people like, frankly, you and me on stage speaking at this event.
Josh Lupresto (07:50)
Mm.
Chris White (08:09)
and all of them had written a book and then launched a business on the heels of that book. And I said, if I’m ever going to do this, I need to publish. And I tried. I tried for about a year and I would go a few weeks of writing and then I would lose momentum for a few weeks and a few weeks of writing and then lose momentum. And when I found this coach, and I’m not sure if I found him or if he found me,
The first conversation he and I had, he said, Chris, if you do everything I tell you to do, when I tell you to do it, your book will be published as a number one bestselling new release on Amazon in two months or less. Now, I wasn’t sure I believed him, Josh, but I desperately wanted to. And what was the aha moment? If you’re going to write a book, you need to do it like a sprint, not a marathon.
Josh Lupresto (09:04)
Mm.
Chris White (09:08)
My coach told me countless times, completion over perfection, completion over perfection. Here’s the interesting truth. Since then, I’ve actually inspired two or three other people to write books of their own, what I was taught. So that’s it. And I believe everyone has it. I failed freshman English 101. If I can publish a best-selling
Josh Lupresto (09:24)
Ugh.
Chris White (09:38)
book anyone can and I believe all of us have a book in it. So a slightly long-winded answer, but hopefully that context provides a better answer.
Josh Lupresto (09:43)
Love it. I like it.
I love it, I love a good story. ⁓ All right, so let’s think about, I wanna set this up for this other centered selling concept, right? So you got a lot of powerful concepts, you do a lot of trainings and you’re teaching folks different things, but I think this is the one that sticks out. I think it flips traditional sales instincts a little bit on their head, right? Like we got a lot of people that have been selling for a long time and we kinda just go, right? And it works. ⁓ So walk us through.
Chris White (10:09)
100%.
Josh Lupresto (10:18)
To find the framework, what is other centered selling and kind of why is it such a critical mindset shift ⁓ for these sellers, these consultants.
Chris White (10:26)
Yeah. And what you said is that it flips the traditional way of thinking about sales. That’s an important foundation. The best way to think of other centered selling is it’s the opposite of self-centered selling. And when people first hear that, I think they’re put off a little bit. Like who you call a
Josh Lupresto (10:47)
I was when you told
me.
Chris White (10:49)
Right? who are you calling self-centered?
Are you suggesting we’re self-centered or are you suggesting I’m selfish? And the truth is, is that we all tend to default to self. It’s just human nature. It’s just the natural default. And the way in which I actually demonstrate this to people is first I ask the simple question, the compass works because it always blank blank. And what’s the answer? It always…
Josh Lupresto (11:18)
points snore.
Chris White (11:19)
Points north and and I think I mentioned to you there’s always someone in the room that says well actually Chris It’s not it doesn’t always point north it points to magnetic north and that’s not always north Okay, so anybody out there who feels like they they wanted to correct me. I’m I’m corrected Here’s the interesting truth. We all have a compass lodge right here in our psyche and Where does our compass our mental our psyche compass tend to point it tends to point to self and we don’t
That doesn’t mean we’re bad people, doesn’t mean we’re selfish. It just means we tend to default to self. And when I run workshops, I tell people, I bet I can prove it. I always begin my workshops by taking a photo of the group. And then I ask if they would like to see the photo and of course they want to look at it. And I show them the picture. And about an hour later, we’re talking about this other centered idea. And I say, you know, I showed you a picture of this group about an hour ago. Whose picture did you look for first?
And of course the answer is, look for myself. I mean, think back to the last time you went on vacation with your spouse and your kids, even the pictures that you’re not in are a little less interesting. And that’s our family for crying out loud. So what’s the point? The point is, is if we recognize that it’s natural for us to default to self, there are certain things that we can do and certain…
Josh Lupresto (12:32)
Yeah.
Chris White (12:46)
philosophies and mindsets that we can embrace that change the way we approach every prospect and every customer. Does it guarantee that we’re going to sell more? Of course not. Does it guarantee that we’re going to close every deal? Of course not. But does it increase the likelihood that they’ll want to have a conversation? Does it increase the likelihood that they’ll
share some of their priorities, 100%. And here’s the more important part, Josh, and I’d love to take you and your audience through some of the more specific things that we talk about, but here’s what we believe to be true. We are most fulfilled when serving other people. And that’s really, you mentioned serving, not selling.
When we think of traditional selling, it’s, well, if you just say this, or if you just do this, then they will do this. But that’s a, what’s the word I’m looking for here? That’s an illusion. Control is an illusion. We can’t control other people. We think we can, but we can’t. So the more we come to peace with the fact that
Actually, I can’t control. And the moment we come to peace with the fact that, you know, it is their right to decide and we approach it with that mindset. It again, it changes everything. And here’s the last thing I’ll say. It’s an, it’s an unfair. Here are two other fundamental truths. And it’s, it’s simply unfair. The first, no one likes to feel as though they’re being sold to. Period. Right? Number two.
Josh Lupresto (14:20)
Yeah.
Totally.
Chris White (14:41)
is as sales professionals, we are quote, guilty until proven innocent.
Right? People are naturally suspicious of salespeople. So if people are naturally suspicious of salespeople, which means they’re naturally unreceptive, and if no one likes to feel as though they’re being sold to, well, that puts us in a pretty difficult position, doesn’t it? As sales professionals, because it is our job to sell. So how do we break through that? And that’s what this is all about. I’ll come up for air now.
Josh Lupresto (14:52)
then
Thanks
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, I think you bring up good points, right? ⁓ There’s a lot of kind of traditional old school brow beating sales techniques that used to work. When I started doing, I still remember, I thought it was so awesome when I was going through it. One of the first things when I got into sales was door to door vacuums. I it was this like binder training, zig zigler, like brow beat them into submission. And Chris, you care about your health, right? Yeah, Josh, I do.
Yeah, then I mean, this is really important to you to probably figure out the next steps of what you need to do to get all that right, you know, clean the house for the kids and the air and the carpet, all this good stuff, right? I’m like, yeah, I’m one step, six yeses and six nods will get me to that $3,000 vacuum, right? And I think sometimes people are just fine, sure, and then you leave them in a world of regret. think you’re this this idea of self flips it on its head to your point of what I’ve seen when
when we start to leverage mindsets like this, if we know that we’re naturally self and we know that if we take that and know that the prospects and the customers want to talk about themselves, then we have to lock into that. And you and I talked about this earlier, right? The old mindset of engineering was show up and throw up and man.
If I just tell them about these 25 things that I think they need to know, they will be so excited, right? That’s some just basic if then logic. But maybe I ask them, what are they interested in? What do they care about? What’s most important to them? Yes, I love you come at it from such a different angle that I don’t think a lot of people talk about. So I love I love that. And I want to talk a little bit about maybe let’s talk about how do we apply it, right? So if our advisor is in a conversation,
Chris White (16:46)
Bingo.
Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (17:08)
Maybe it’s upselling, cross-selling an existing customer, maybe they’ve sold them CX and now they want to go to cloud or security or whatever, right? Or maybe it’s even a new prospect where they’re kind of distilling down this value. How do we, it’s not just this philosophical framework, right? I think it can be very practical. So how do we leverage that? it demoing? I mean, maybe not demoing as much because our vendors end up doing that when we get the deal to a certain point. But how do we put it into practice?
What would you want our advisors to kind of hear some of the best habits and tactics?
Chris White (17:38)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So there’s three words that I’m going to share, Josh, priority, pressure, and point of view. guess point of view is three in and of itself, but there’s three ideas, priority, pressure, and point of view. We’ll cover those three one at a time. The first is priority. The sellers, anybody that we’re approaching assumes that we are our own priority because we’re in sales, right? I’m sure you and your, some of your audience may have heard the term commission breath.
Right? Like, I can literally smell it on your breath. Every word that comes out of your mouth is just tied to a commission. So the first question is, who are we going to make the priority in the conversation? Is it ourselves and our agenda, our desire to move them to the cloud, for example, or is it the customer?
And what we encourage people to do, and by the way, I’ve said we a couple of times, I need to give credit where creditors do. I work with a sales training organization called Aslan Sales Training. That’s A-S-L-A-N like the lion in the Chronicles of Narnia. So all of this material, all this work is part of the Aslan program. What we encourage people to do is before the meeting, literally before every meeting,
Josh Lupresto (18:44)
Love that.
Chris White (18:56)
Take 10, 15, maybe 20 seconds to make the conscious decision to reset the compass. Make a conscious decision. Remind yourself and make the conscious decision. Okay, I know what I want to get out of this meeting or I know what I want to get out of this lead or this relationship, but I’m going to put that aside or make that secondary and make them the priority. Just remind yourself this is about them, not about me.
Now, some people hear me say this, Josh, and say, come on, Chris, tell us the truth. You’ve been lying until now. Tell us the truth. Do you really make a conscious decision before every single meeting to make the other person the priority? My answer is no, I don’t because I’m no more or less human than anybody else. And I forget sometimes to remind, I start moving fast. I forget.
Josh Lupresto (19:33)
You
Chris White (19:55)
But here’s the interesting thing. I can see the difference. I recognize the difference between the meetings in which I remind myself before the meeting, Chris, this is not about you. This is about them and those in which I don’t. And in those meetings in which I don’t, I catch myself 10, 15, 20 minutes into the meeting. I realize that, oh my gosh, I am so just driving my agenda.
and not fully tuning in to what this individual cares about and making them the priority. So that’s the first one and that’s where I’ll pause. Make the intentional decision to make them the priority.
Josh Lupresto (20:36)
Is that, ⁓ I guess, kind of as a prep, you’re going into a meeting as a prep and a little bit of reset. There’s this kind of psychology, guess. I think everybody needs to pause, put it on rewind for a minute or two and kind of listen to that again and then come back to it and go, okay, the psychology, if we get into kind of the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus and all that stuff.
doesn’t it take, what, I forget the latest data, 21 days for the brain to kind of lock in and learn and be reminded of this new habit? I don’t know if you’ve seen any good research on that of how long does it really take to apply this consistently before you can really go, okay, I still have to remind myself once in a while, but what does the science tell us? Do we know?
Chris White (21:30)
So first of all, that’s way beyond my technical, you know, pay grade on brain science. I’m going to suggest this, Josh. I believe this is fighting human nature. And so for that reason, I don’t know if this ever becomes a natural habit. I think developing the habit of reminding ourselves on a consistent basis,
can become habitual, but I don’t think doing so without consciously reminding ourselves ever happens just automatically. And I’m gonna give you a perfect example. And this is the way we think of it. In every meeting and every conversation, everything you do, there are self-centered goals and there are other centered goals. And so the question is, is what are you focused on?
And I’m going to use this very podcast as an example. About five minutes before I joined the call with you, I said to myself, Chris, remember, this is about Josh and his audience and giving them something that is beneficial to them more than you promoting yourself. And that is the mental state that I gave. And we can’t fake these principles. Motive is transparent.
Either you sincerely, either I sincerely wanna show up and give you and your audience something or not. And if anything good happens for me, great. But that’s not the point. And I’ve been doing, I mean, I’ve been working with Aslan for five or six years. And again, I’ll never stop trying to remind myself every time.
Josh Lupresto (23:12)
Totally. Well…
No, it’s a great point. ⁓ I think people can just see through disingenuous behaviors, The human being is a smart species. Like you said, we’re naturally on guard. ⁓ going, what is this? Our brains want to go, what is this thing? Do I eat it? Do I kill it? What’s it trying to do? We’re kind of in that defensive state. It’s like we’re to ⁓ a car lot every day.
and we’re having to make a decision of how do we make it out of there alive and still accomplish what needs. So I like that. I like that that challenges the norm. I think it’s a great like, always work on how to get better. I mean, look at the, even from a science perspective, what’s the common thread? We’ve all seen these, you we’ve had them at our sales kickoffs and all these great guys that have trained the Kobe Bryant’s and, you know, this athlete, or you look at the guy that did, I forget his name, Michael Jordan’s book.
Chris White (24:01)
Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (24:18)
All that good stuff, right? The theme is, it’s not that they’re negative on their selves. I don’t want us to be negative on ourselves, but we have to be in this state of constant improvement. It has to never be good enough. And so I think if we just embody that to your point, it forces us to take a minute to just pause before everything. And I like it. Always work on self.
Chris White (24:43)
Yeah, if you triggered a thought, if I can just share a quick story. So, so, and I’ll make just a quick plug. So you’re going to be a guest on my LinkedIn live, I think in January. And I had, I had a gentleman who he, he is a motivational speaker and public speaker. And he used to be a basketball performance coach. And he worked with one of the most elite high schools here in the DC area to map a high school for a number of years, and then started working with pros.
Josh Lupresto (24:53)
Yes, sir.
Chris White (25:13)
to the extent where you mentioned Kobe Bryant. He actually had the opportunity to work with Kobe Bryant. And he said, Chris, the first day, he was actually on my show. He said, the first time that I met Kobe Bryant, I sat through one of his practices with his skills coach. And he said, Chris, I watched him over and over and over, layups, passes, pivots, nothing but fundamentals. And he said, he said,
After the practice, he and I had a meeting and one of the first things I said to him is, Coby, you’re the best player in the world. Why are you so focused on fundamentals? And he said, Coby looked at me with that million dollar smile and he said, I’m the best player in the world because I never get tired of working on the fundamentals. And that’s it. It’s all about the fundamentals.
Josh Lupresto (26:08)
Boom. That’s it. Hey, I think that’s a great place to wrap it, man. ⁓ I think we got a lot of good lessons in there. ⁓ I love how sometimes these great lessons are wrapped in the fundamentals of the basics because it’s just life just happens. We forget other things go and we go about our day. And I think for us to be the best at what we do, I love kind of the thoughts that you bring to the table about just how to reflect on
Chris White (26:30)
Yep.
Josh Lupresto (26:38)
the basics every day, how to just flip the mindset. ⁓ There’s a lot of good content out there. There’s a lot of noise out there too. So I appreciate you coming on, man. I’m looking forward to kind of being on your show and love the energy. I know there’s a lot more to unpack, but I thought this is awesome, I think, for our audience of advisors to hear.
Chris White (27:00)
Yeah, at the end of the day, it’s about them, not us. If we can remember that, that sets us apart from virtually every other sales professional on the planet.
Josh Lupresto (27:11)
Yeah. Cool, man. All right. Well, go Hoosiers. don’t have Notre Dame to root for. So, know, JMU I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll be rooting for JMU for you.
Chris White (27:21)
We’re happy to take anyone on the bandwagon if you’re interested to jump on.
Josh Lupresto (27:24)
I love it. Awesome. All right, everybody wraps this up for this week. Chris White, author, speaker, ⁓ so much good stuff. Great nuggets in here. How to flip it into going other centered selling. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of Sales Engineering. Till next time.