Transformative Insights into Sales and Leadership from 'Sell Like a Monk' - Mike Ferrell

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey, uncommon Leaders, welcome back. This is the Uncommon Leader Podcast and I'm your host, john Gallagher. In today's episode, I've got another great guest for you at the Monk Guy, mike Ferrell. Mike has an incredible journey to share as he navigates through a personal and professional crisis during the financial turmoil of 2008. We'll hear how he battled burnout, depression and a difficult divorce before finding solace and writing a book about his experiences. That's not all. Mike discovered the rule of Benedict confounded to be a blueprint for his book Sell Like a Monk. Mike extracted seven principles that applied to leadership and sales. During this conversation, mike also touched upon the challenges of transitioning from a successful producer to a manager, the importance of understanding human behavior through positive psychology and the impact of virtues such as courage, wisdom, humility, justice and magnanimity. Say that three times fast. Let's get started. Mike Ferrell, welcome to the Uncommon Leader Podcast. It's great to have you on the show. How you doing today.

Speaker 2: 1:07

I'm good, John. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 1:10

Absolutely. I'm looking forward to our conversation, learning about your book and learning a little bit more about you that our listeners get a chance to hear. I will start you, though just like I started every other first time guest on the podcast with a question to get to know more about you, just to tell me a story from your childhood that still impacts who you are as a person or as a leader today.

Speaker 2: 1:30

Okay, I don't know that I've got a particular story, but probably the greatest impact that I had from my childhood was really watching my dad my dad was in the insurance and investment business for over 50 years and watching him take care of his clients. My dad was really really one of those salespeople that I really believed in servicing versus selling. To really watch him do that for all of those years and especially and I can remember he would do like barbecues and stuff for his clients when I was a kid You'd get to see him interact with them. It was always fascinating to me that every one of them thought of him as their best friend, not as somebody that was just selling something, and especially in that industry. I think that was really, really impactful for me.

Speaker 1: 2:35

Mike, I appreciate you sharing that story. I love how so many of these stories impact. They are parents that have had a positive impact on what has shaped individuals and how it just brings back so many cool memories. Frankly as you talk about that service, it leads right into the main topic of our conversation today. That's the book that you've authored. It just came out in May of this year, called Sell Like a Month Timeless rules for modern selling. It had rules and quotes. Tell me a little bit of the story behind this book, and maybe it's a story about you as well. Why did you write this book? Who did you write this book for?

Speaker 2: 3:13

Well, I've spent 35 years now, I think, working with salespeople, sales organizations and leaders. Over that period of time, I've seen a significant shift in my thoughts versus the way most sales organizations do things. I think, if you look at it, I start out in the first chapter in the book and I talk about most sales organizations most sales processes really focus on am I seeing enough people? Am I making enough calls? Am I doing enough presentations? Am I closing enough sales? If I do all of those numbers, then I'm going to be successful. If I'm successful, then I'm going to be happy. As I've worked over the years and I've worked with high performers and all the way down to newbies I think that we've got it backwards. I think that if we start with the individual and make sure that they understand their own God-given strengths, gifts and talents and allow them to flourish that way in a system that's flexible enough for them to use them, then I believe we have a greater chance of success in that profession. I think if you look at the sales profession today and this is across all industries there's a turnover rate of almost 40%. Compare that to other jobs out there. It's extremely. It's much, much higher than any other job out there. When you start looking at specific industries I've spent many, many years working in the financial services area If you look at that industry and 85% of the people that start a job in that industry today will be gone in two years you think about it from a company standpoint, from an organizational standpoint. The amount of money. They're spending billions of dollars replacing these people. And yet if we look at the way that they're recruiting, they're hiring, they're training, they're managing, they're doing it the same way they've been doing it for 50 years. It's the numbers game and I think the numbers game is broken and that really is what kind of led to the writing of the book and then obviously being introduced to this whole benedictive approach to work and sales and then also leadership.

Speaker 1: 5:51

Look, I can't read to talk about that too. I want to put a pin in the benedictive approach. But I wanted to touch on something you mentioned 85% in a specific industry won't even be around in two years. You also mentioned a 40% turnover rate. That turnover rate, I want to assume isn't always the turnover rate because they're not performing, but that it has to be the stress level. Now, inside of some of your literature you talk about the three primary drivers as mental health problems for sales professionals in this space. Tell me, talk to me a little bit more about you know, that piece of the turnover. I may be a little bit about how, again, how so, like a month, your person-centric approach can be helpful to that and reduce the number.

Speaker 2: 6:33

Well, and I'll start with, before I get into that, those areas and statistics. I'll start with, kind of you know my in the very beginning of the book I talked about some of the things that I've learned over these 35 years and in working with salespeople and sales organizations as the number one. Sales is hard, it's not easy and most of the time it's made harder by poor management. And then, secondly, great salespeople typically don't make great sales managers. You're talking about two completely different skill sets. And then the other piece is that we can't clone great salespeople. I've had the privilege to work with some of the highest performers across various industries and they all do it different. You know, they all have a different way of succeeding. And I think when we look at these, and if you look at the way companies create these metrics, they're typically based on their high performers. Well, these high performers, in most cases they're doing things a little bit differently. So, with that being said, to get to your question, john, we look at, you know, the things that are going on. The sales health alliance has done a lot of research on sales and kind of how it's impacting mental health, and what we know is that these mental health issues of 65% of salespeople report that they're suffering some type of mental health issue, whether it's anxiety or stress or depression or whatever the case may be, and they attribute that to number one, micromanaging by their managers. Number two, not hitting targets. And number three, working with other demotivated salespeople. And so if you look at that kind of culture, if you look at what's being done, I think culture might be one of the most abused terms in the business world today, but I'll use it here because I think it's that sales culture that is leading to this turnover rate and this dissatisfaction, and I read an article just this morning that says that this dissatisfaction and disenchantment and disengagement with job roles has even accelerated just in the last two years. And so I think it's time that sales organizations and salespeople think about a different model.

Speaker 1: 9:12

Mike, you touched on those, that is. First of all, thank you for sharing that. As I listened through that, I had a very specific person that came to my mind here when you said great salespeople don't always make great sales managers and there are actually, in and of itself, the stress of, hey, this person's a great sales person. They must make a great sales manager then and everybody will start to be better. Yet that person, who's I know they'll be listening in and hearing this and they'll call me when it's done has said really, I have no desire to be a sales manager, but they keep asking me to be a sales manager. I just love being a great sales person and approach to the user and building relationships with his customers and things like that. And, mike, you gotta know he was the one I shared the book with as well, as he's going down this journey. So I get. I look forward to talking to him about both these things as he went through that. So I appreciate you sharing that. I appreciate you sharing, as you said, some of the reasons as well those drivers, those mental health problems, because that doesn't just exist in sales positions. But I can understand why. Sales, you're exactly right, sales is a hard job to do. You can break it down into easy disciplines over and over again to your point. If you just get the numbers, it'll happen. But even in and of itself that can be a stressful process to get the numbers to make the calls to you know to know all the time and you know you hear no more than anybody else in the industry. So that's very important to understand. So you wrote this book based on a series of seven principles. Let's come back to the Benedictine approach. Tell me a little bit whether you may not get to talk about all seven principles, but tell me a little bit about how you came up with those seven principles inside of the book?

Speaker 2: 10:48

Sure, and I think what I'll do, john, is I'll kind of give you how I got to this whole Benedictine approach. First, because it was a journey that's taken several years, and I tell the story when I speak that on September 15th 2008, I was on a flight from Minneapolis to Charlotte and I got off the plane at about 9.15 that morning and as I turned on my Blackberry when I got off the plane, it blew up. There were messages and texts and all kinds of stuff, and as I walked into the terminal there, there were people gathered all around the TVs and, of course, your first thought at that point is oh my God, did we have another 9.11? Well, as I listened a little bit more, about 45 minutes prior to that, lehman Brothers had filed bankruptcy and kind of the official start to the financial crisis of 2008,. There had been a lot of other things that had happened prior to that, but that was sort of the official start. And so what happened over those next really two and a half to three years? And at that point I was working with 37 community banks, 17 brokerage companies and about 120 financial advisors and I spent the next two to three years really first talking them off ledges and then navigating this crisis and navigating number one how they can survive and, in some cases, how they can thrive and over that three years it took its toll on me. By the time I got to 2012, I was burnt out, I was suffering from depression. I went through a difficult divorce in 2013 and really kind of shut down my business and said, you know, I don't want to do this stuff anymore and kind of, you know, went through the next couple of years wandering aimlessly and went to some places that I don't really care to go to ever again. But but as I came out of that, I thought you know what? I want to write a book about this? I want to talk about a reflection on what I found during that crisis, and so that was actually my second book that I wrote, and that one was called the Sweet Spot, where business strategy, faith principles and positive psychology converge, and it was really this idea of how do we lead through crisis. And so as I was working on that book, I was introduced to this rule of Benedict, and Benedict was a monk back in the in the fifth century. He was. He wrote this little and it's a short little 73 chapter book, the chap. Some of the chapters are only a couple of paragraphs, and it was really a blueprint for how we live and work in community. And as he wrote this it began to kind of take hold. This was this was right. After the fall of Rome, the world is in chaos, you know, we think things are in chaos now, probably a lot worse than than that it is now, you know, and but a couple of centuries later, charlemagne would actually take this document and instill it into most of the institutions, the governments, the education system in Western Europe, and so Benedict has often been called the father of Western civilization. So he created this rule. Well, I got a hold of this rule and I began to really study it and read it and begin to pull principles out of it, first for leadership, because it was a program that I was working on for a university here, but then, also, looking at it from a standpoint, these same principles really apply to sales as well. And so I seven principles out of the rule that really resonated both for leaders and for salespeople, and so that's really kind of where I started the book with these seven principles, what I call monk principles, that that came out of that book. So the seven of them are what I call the rule of leading oneself, which is really all about virtue and character, and the second one is the rule of strengths or talents, which is about our own God given strengths and talents. The third one is higher purpose and vision, which is really understanding what our higher purpose is and having a vision for what we want to accomplish. And then those are what I call the inner game of selling. So those are the mental, the head and heart part of what we do. And then the connector piece is the rule of excellence, which is really understanding our own story, our own branding, and putting it into a framework that allows us to take it to the outer game of selling, which is that exterior approach. And there we talk about the rule of order and stability, which is really a sales process. It's a sales process and I think too many sales organizations and companies and sales people get it backwards. They try and sell somebody first and then make them a client or a customer. And I think if we build a relationship first and then get them to the point, I just did a I think you saw my email that I do once a week that I sent out and I talk about. You know, it's not a matter of how many times we ask somebody to buy, it's a matter of asking at the right time, and that rule of order and stability really talks about that. And then the rule of community is really how do we impact others around us? The other, you know, we talk about that number of working with disenchanted coworkers and salespeople. You know what are the things in that rule of community that says let's focus on our sales teams, let's focus on our other vendors, let's focus on our other stakeholders as well as our customers. And then the last rule is the rule of hospitality, and really this is an idea of moving beyond customer service to what I call radical hospitality. And so those were those seven principles that I pulled out of the rule and those are the principles that I talk about in the book. And then there's an eighth one, which really focuses more on sales leaders and managers.

Speaker 1: 17:20

Hey listeners, I want to take a quick moment to share something special with you. Many of the topics and discussions we have on this podcast are areas where I provide coaching and consulting services for individuals and organizations. If you've been inspired by our conversation and are seeking a catalyst for change in your own life or within your team, I invite you to visit coachjohngallaghercom forward slash free call to sign up for a free coaching call with me. It's an opportunity for us to connect, discuss your unique challenges and explore how coaching or consulting can benefit you and your team. I'm here to equip you and encourage you every step of the way. Okay, let's get back to the show. Mike, I love that. I love the connector as well, in terms of how you go through that and the inner and the outer piece of it. I mean the picture. While I can't necessarily show it, obviously, on the audio, I'd love to see if I can figure out a way to put the picture in the notes. The Venn diagram of the overlap. I am curious just to maybe dive a little bit deeper on one or two of them, because I was, as I read through Bruce, through the book, and looked at the rule of leading oneself, how virtual character and positive behaviors can factor in developing the salesperson. Tell me a little bit more about that. Go deeper on that in terms of leading one, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 18:38

Well, it really starts with this whole idea of virtue, of virtuousness, in that and this goes back to ancient philosophy, this goes back to Aristotle the good life and what it is to live. The good life he talks about virtue, and virtue is really what is it that we can do in order to be virtuous and to do good and to live good? Out of that, I identified five what I call sales virtues. They are courage. Obviously, a salesperson has got to have courage to step up and do the job every single day. Wisdom, which we need to have in order to understand when and when not to do and say certain things. Okay, go first Grasso. Humility, which is the whole idea of sales, service versus sales, you know. Justice, which is really understanding, doing things right. And then the last one was magnanimity. I love that word magnanimity, love it too. And it's really seeing the greatness in others. And if we think about it from a sales perspective, rather than trying to attain greatness ourselves, if we see the greatness in others that we serve, it allows us to move beyond that idea of the self-centered sales approach. So those are the sales virtues that I really touch on in the book.

Speaker 1: 20:14

Mike, I appreciate you sharing that. Again, as I listen through, I can see you teaching this as well and going forward. I don't want to try to say magnanimity I don't know if I said that right or not. I'm not going to say greatness in others. It's a couple other words like that that I've had to use recently that I get my tongue tangled up with. No doubt about it. And when you think about how you now teach this approach to sales individuals, as you're coaching, maybe to sales groups or organizations, can you share with us you know, without giving away who it is can you share with us a success story utilizing this approach, how someone's been able to transform their sales themselves and organizations using it?

Speaker 2: 20:55

Yeah, and I think the thing about it is, and probably the last 12 years I've used this approach, I actually put the framework to it in the last four or five years, but I've been using the same approach for quite some time and if I look at those organizations and salespeople that I've been able to coach over the last, you know, a dozen years or so, the results can speak for themselves. You know, I think, a lot of time, especially in the sales coaching environment, we typically will work with somebody for six months, maybe a year, and after that it kind of gets, you know, it gets stale. Well, you know, a lot of my clients average 2.7 years, okay, which is, you know, unheard of, I think, in, especially in sales coaching, leadership coaching maybe not so much, but. And then the other thing is, you know, the organizations that I've worked with have been able to average a 17% growth rate, and when you start looking at those numbers, those are some significant numbers. Again, I think the challenge is to get them to rethink the way that they do sales. And that's really, you know, there's a great book out there by Adam Grant called Think Again, and he really talks about this whole idea of how we rethink. You know, we typically think like the preacher, the prosecutor or the politician, you know, in that we're trying to get people to either buy into our ideas, you know, we're trying to convince them. I kind of use the example of my grandson, you know, first, first I try and convince him of the merits of doing something a certain way. Then I try and tell him that if he doesn't do it he's in trouble, you know. And then finally you give in and you bribe him and say I'll give you a candy bar if you do it. You know, it's kind of that approach, you know, and Grant says that instead we should think about it from the standpoint of a scientist or a philosopher, in that we doubt everything that we know, which drives curiosity. We begin to be curious about what we don't know. We have the humility to understand that we're not right, and then that leads to discovery. And I think we can use that approach in a whole bunch of different things in society today. But I think that for sales organizations it's really important that they understand that you've got it. I mean, we've been doing the same way for decades and you got to rethink how you do it.

Speaker 1: 23:34

That's the second time I've heard that book think again the past two weeks as a suggestion, I'm going to have to add that to my list. It'll be in my Amazon order bucket here soon. My wife's been looking at too many boxes. When she comes.

Speaker 2: 23:47

Oh yeah, I get that every day. He was just here this morning.

Speaker 1: 23:51

So we have kind of those seven principles and that's how you use it to teach the managers. But you also talk about that. You know that rule at the end, or at least an approach, but how have you also trained the leaders? So this is a group of uncommon leaders that are listening in, that want to become better.

Speaker 2: 24:06

Right.

Speaker 1: 24:07

And how are you training leaders to be better sales managers, better managers of sales leaders, of salespeople, to be successful?

Speaker 2: 24:15

Yeah, I think number one is understanding that we have to create a flexible enough system or process to allow our salespeople to flourish using their own God-given strengths, gifts and talents. You know, just quickly, going back to that rule of leading oneself, you've got the virtue piece of it, you've got the character piece, character, and the positive behavior really falls into that area of positive psychology. And positive psychology is a relatively new science. It's only been around since the late 90s, but it really takes. Prior to that, psychology really took a person that was negative 10 and figured out how to get them to zero, and Martin Seligman, who's kind of known as the Godfather of positive psychology, said that we need to be looking at taking somebody that's at zero and getting them to positive, to plus 10. And that's the whole approach that positive psychology uses. So but the interesting thing about positive psychology is when you really study it, it's all based on virtue. In fact, he created an entire classification of 24 character strengths and they're broken up into six different virtues. So even though the you know the psychology piece, you know the scientists of course would never say that they want to be associated with the philosophers and the theologians, but in reality that's where their foundation is. But if you take that and there's some great tools that I use one is called the values and action inventory, which is Seligman's tool that he developed. It's out of the University of Pennsylvania and it's a great tool it assesses your top 24 character strengths and once you know those strengths and you know especially you know those top five to eight it allows you to look at that and say, ok, how am I selling? Or, from a leadership standpoint, how are my people selling? Or how should they be selling in order to be the best that they can be. And then also looking at positive behaviors, and positive behaviors really comes from the thought process or the thought leadership of Kim Cameron and Bob Quinn at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. And Cameron talks about what he says is the heliotropic effect. And the heliotropic effect and I use the example I'm here in South Dakota and I use the example if you drive down a country road in South Dakota in August at eight o'clock in the morning and there's a field of sunflowers to your right, all the sunflowers are going to be pointing to the east. And if you drive back by that same sunflower field at four o'clock in the afternoon, all the sunflowers have turned and they're going to be pointing to the west. They follow the sun. That's the heliotropic effect, and all living things are attracted to that positive energy and that positive light. And so when we look at positive behaviors, positive sales behaviors, we look at things like empathy and compassion, optimism, grit, you know, certainly you've got to have some perseverance to be in sales, you know and those kinds of things. So by measuring those, by understanding our character, strengths and the sales virtues, it allows us as managers or as leaders, to really put people in a place where they can succeed. And then, rather than and again, I think what I really talk about in the book with this leaders and sales managers thing, is that it's two different hats that you wear. Unfortunately, most sales managers wear the hat that all they're doing is managing tasks. You know, did you do this, did you do that? Did you do this? You know you and I are both, you know, fans of Rory Vaden, and Rory talks about should heads, you know. And you should have done this you should have done this or that or whatever you know. And I think if we take that managing hat off and put on a leading hat instead and be more of a coaching and mentoring approach versus this managing of tasks approach, then we begin to allow people to work in this, in this process, using these principles to flourish.

Speaker 1: 28:32

Mike I appreciate that it goes all the way back to your statement really about not all sales managers make great excuse me, not all sales people make great sales managers and ultimately leading to if you, if you have a sales manager, doesn't have those virtues and empathy built in, they're going to want everybody to work just like they did and you're going to assume that everybody's going to work just like that person. Yet, with these different character traits, the leader has to understand those and be able to understand. Yes, the tasks are very important, but to get the best out of that person, you got to be able to motivate and inspire and encourage them in a different way. They do things better in a different, a different way of times, based on those character traits. So I appreciate that and I actually think, as I listen to that it just makes that even more clear about kind of that, that salespeople and what that really means. Mike, I think I wish you the best on the book I want to talk to actually get the listeners to learn a little bit more about you. And now I got to tell you there was one thing when I looked, when I read your LinkedIn profile. I mean, obviously, the sales experiences there and those types of things are there, but from a personal standpoint, you've already taught me the word magnanimity and I said that one, but there's another word that was in there that I didn't know what it was. Is it defined who you are? You're a leader, you're a coach, you're a trainer and you're a benedictine oblate. Right, sorry, I didn't look it up yet, but tell me, tell the listeners, what is a benedictine oblate?

Speaker 2: 29:54

Well, a benedictine oblate is really an individual that has studied and learned the rule and then committed their life to living the rule. And so you go through a process it's typically a two year process to really learn the rule and understand it and that kind of thing and then you take a vow to uphold that rule, live it in your life, and you take a vow also then to a particular monastery or priory or whatever it is. I happen to be connected with the monastery, the Sacred Heart Monastery in Yankton, south Dakota. That's where I took my vows to become a benedictine oblate. So it really is just, and it really is one of those things the rule has so impacted my life, not just from a work environment, but from a family environment, from a social environment. It really is. It is this idea of you know they use benedict, uses the term aura at labor, which means work and prayer, and it really is this idea of living in balance and that approach and as I apply it to the work that I do with leaders, as I apply it to the work that I do with salespeople, to really live it out and walk the walk, I think is really important. And I think the other thing it really does is it allows me to really talk on a deeper level with leaders of organizations you know I talk about on my website. I talk about that I work with faith-connected organizations and leaders and not and I think the faith-connected piece is I use the word connected intentionally it's not that it's a particular connection to a religion or any of those kinds of things, but it's somebody that has that belief and that connection in their faith and understands that that's an important aspect of success.

Speaker 1: 32:01

Absolutely, and it goes all the way back to that person-centric, whole person-centric approach that you talk about. I can see that. I can hear that in your voice, mike, I can understand as you teach it and I appreciate you sharing that with the listeners as well. Mike, you've been very generous with your time today. I just have a couple more questions. One of them is folks are going to want to stay in touch with you. No doubt about it in terms of learning, absolutely. What's the best way for them to stay in touch with you?

Speaker 2: 32:27

Well, the easiest way is just to go to my website, and it's an easy one themunkguycom. You know, as part of our work, you know, with with brand builders, I kind of went through a whole rebrand here over the last several months and and thanks to them, came up with the monitor moniker themunkguy. And so themunkguycom is the easiest place to to find my website, and I will even throw in a little, a little caveat there, or a little incentive there, john First two people to go to that website and sign up for the newsletter that I do the monk principles two plus one you can go down and scroll down to the bottom of the home page and there's a form there. First two people to do it from your podcast, I'll send them a copy of the book. Sell like a muck.

Speaker 1: 33:15

Excellent. No, I appreciate that, listeners. hey, when there's every free, free, incentives, you got to pay attention and get that through we save that to the end, and especially those of you all the state all the way through this to hear it through. That's awesome, mike. Again, I so appreciate your time today. I'll finish you with the last question that I always finish with First time listeners and opportunity again to learn more about you, but I'm going to give you a billboard. I may know something actually is going to be on this thing. I don't know, you may have already said it, but I'm going to give you a billboard. You can put it anywhere you want to. In South Dakota there might not be millions going by it, but maybe you put it somewhere else as you're traveling around, as you go through. You can put anything you want to on that billboard, though, any message that you want to. What do you put on that billboard and why?

Speaker 2: 33:52

You know, I think I put on that billboard the same thing that I put on the t-shirts that I give away on the front of them mission driven by muck principles. It's that idea that says we do things on a very different level using these muck principles, whether that's leading, whether that's selling, whether that's working, whether that's living in community. I think these muck principles give, and our world needs this, John, it needs this desperately. I think that if we really look at these muck principles and how they work, not only in sales and leadership but in life in general, I think our world would be a better place.

Speaker 1: 34:37

Mike Drop-Omen. Thank you very much, mike Farrell, for joining the Uncommon Leader Podcast. Let's stay in touch, okay, and I wish you the best.

Speaker 2: 34:44

Sounds great, John. I appreciate the time. Thank you.

Speaker 1: 34:48

And that wraps up another episode of the Uncommon Leader Podcast. Thanks for tuning in today. If you found value in this episode, I encourage you to share it with your friends, colleagues or anyone else who could benefit from the insights and inspiration we've shared. Also, if you have a moment, I'd greatly appreciate it if you could leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback not only helps us to improve, but it also helps others discover the podcast and join our growing community of Uncommon Leaders. Until next time, go and grow Champions.