(888) 815-0802Focus on Sales Behaviors — not Product, with Sean Sheppard [Episode 734]
I have another excellent episode lined up for you today coming back and joining me for a second time on the show is Sean Sheppard. Sean is the founder and CEO of GrowthX. GrowthX is a Silicon Valley based venture capital partnership with an accelerator focused on sales.
And in this week’s episode. I’ll be talking to Sean about what he calls The Lasting-Mover Advantage. And we’ve all heard of the First-Mover Advantage. Well in our conversation today, Sean and I got to talk about why it pays to go slow upfront in order to grow faster? Later.
In this conversation, Sean and I dove into the three things you need to own as the sales team to establish that Lasting-Mover Advantage.
- We’ll talk about why it starts with owning a customer use case. We’ll dig into that.
- After that, once you own the customer use case, what must you do to own their thoughts and actions that they take around it and also get into how to design an organization around the knowledge, skills and behaviors that you need to keep owning the use case as it invariably evolves.
- And let’s get into why it’s so important for companies to have a learning mindset to maintain the lasting mover advantage.
Episode Transcript
Andy Paul
It’s time to accelerate. Hey friends, this is Andy. Welcome to Episode 734 of accelerate. That’s Episode 734 of accelerate the sales podcast of record. I have another excellent episode lined up for you today. Coming back and joining me for a second time on the show. Sean Shepard, Sean is the founder and CEO of growth effects, real effects, a Silicon Valley based venture capital partnership with an accelerator focused on sales. And in this week’s episode, I’ll be talking to Sean about what he calls the lasting mover advantage. And we’ve all heard of the first mover advantage. While in our conversation today, Shawn and I are gonna talk about why it pays to go slow upfront, in order to grow faster later. And in this conversation, Shawn, I dive into the three things you need to own as the sales team to establish that lasting mover advantage. We’ll talk about why it starts with owning the customer use case and we’ll dig into that. After that, once you own the customer use case what must you do to own their thoughts and actions that they take around it. And we’ll also get into how to design an organization around the knowledge skills and behaviors that you need to keep owning the use case as it invariably evolves. And last, we’ll get into it so it’s important for companies to have a learning mindset to maintain the lasting mover advantage. Okay, let’s jump into today’s episode. Sean, welcome to the show.
Sean Sheppard
Thanks, Andy Grant Glad to be here.
Andy Paul
Well, it’s a pleasure to have you back I mean for I know it’s an audio show, but I can just use my words for a few seconds to describe your backdrop. I’m looking at this beautiful backyard and are into California and all this lush greenery. Very nice as opposed to my sort of industrial background right.
Sean Sheppard
Thank you. This is my happy place. This is my this is my Zen Garden away from the madness of the world.
Andy Paul
Oh, nice. Okay, you actually meditate and your Zen garden?
Sean Sheppard
I try every morning. I try to do you know, a couple of minutes.
Andy Paul
So do you use one of the apps like calm or?
Sean Sheppard
No, I’ve learned from a lot of those things. I just sort of like it. I think meditation is a very personal thing. And so I’ve just learned over the years how What works for me? Yeah. Which is really just to just to take in, you know, my surroundings and try to be wholly aware of, of the sights and sounds of nature and use that to start the day with in sort of a very common in you know, nice focused way. Nice. Yeah, I’ve known as long as I possibly can.
Andy Paul
Yeah. Until you got distracted, right?
Sean Sheppard
Yes, yes.
Andy Paul
Yeah. All right. Well, it’s been a while since you’ve been on the show. So may refresh listeners a little bit about growth x. You’re the founder, CEO of growth hack. So tell people about what the
Sean Sheppard
Sure, maybe growth hacks began with. It’s a Silicon Valley based venture capital partnership that also has an accelerator that’s focused on sales, not products. And it has an academy that trains people not just in sales, but in marketing, design, thinking and data science, all the things that move the needle on the market development side. On the development side of the business, hmm. The reason is that we found as serial entrepreneurs turned investors turned frustrated investors because our companies weren’t eating, we found out that they weren’t succeeding because of sales and, and behaviors, not because of product and technology, right? We built our entire program and our core focus is what we call our market acceleration program, which everything’s sort of built out of. I’m all focused on developing markets and making money, not developing products and raising money. And so when you think about things through that lens, it changes very much what you prioritize and in what you contribute to your companies into the talent, to the investor community, to the entrepreneurial community and to the talent that wants to work with them.
Andy Paul
Right. Very cool. All right, we’re gonna what’s the topic, it would suck we’re going to talk about which I think is really interesting because there’s a lot of sales implications for it is it This whole idea of you emphasize not first mover advantage, but last mover advantage, or lasting mover advantage using it to be be precise. So let’s dig into that, because everybody hears what the first first mover advantage is and you’re saying, hey, that’s not always, that’s not always where you want to be.
Sean Sheppard
Yeah, I just said sort of had one of these, one of these moments where I was able to stand back and look at the last 40 plus years of my life growing up in Silicon Valley, where, you know, this has obviously been a hotbed of tech and, and the movement of tech and start to observe, you know, what really has transpired through the through the normal course of doing business and markets development cycle, because you get, you know, when you when you’re playing in the seed stage venture business like I play in, you know, we’re dealing with early product, early market, early customers, early revenue opportunities, and I think find myself having to constantly educate and remind my portfolio companies and just the founder community whole, on the whole at large to go slow in order to be able to go fast later. Mm hmm. I think about scale. Yeah. Right. They raise money based on the idea of this massive market that they can get represented. And then they go to market thinking that that’s just going to happen and then the behaviors just go right down the tubes. And, they never actually stop and go back to the pebble in their shoe and go Okay, for example, that’s what’s my best customer but who’s my first customer? And what do they look like? Huh? approach them and we call it the initial customer profile. Right? Who’s our Mr. Right now? Not our Mr. Right. As I like to joke, right? And so and so through the course of that I just started to have to go back and think about my life and you to Andy knowing you We’ve spent so many of your formal years here in the valley as well. If you look at the five most valuable companies out today, none of them were first in what they were doing right. Apple did not create the GUI interfaces. Xerox did it right at PARC. Right. Right. They were very successful. Does it mean we can go back to when we go back to Tandy?
Andy Paul
Yes. to that lady. Yes.
Sean Sheppard
Yeah. I mean, we could go to these companies that were very strong in the personal computer business that that many people are going to be listening to our podcast I’ve never heard of. Yeah. And then and then we can also go to Google was not by any stretch. The first search engine is a successful one, that’s right. I mean, we use dogpile and we use off of Alta Vista. I mean, there were so many
coming through back then.
You have, you know you have, there’s just a wide variety of those examples, you know, obviously Netflix is crushing it right now. But Mark Buster was around doing that stuff long beforehand.
Andy Paul
Yeah, just reading an article yesterday a story about when Netflix met with blockbuster, blockbuster offered to buy them for $50 million. Yeah. And Reed Hastings and co-founder his new Murphy has actually written by his co founder Dale Cerf laughed and said, Yeah, no. Yeah. We’ll see you guys later.
Sean Sheppard
Yeah, yeah, you’re absolutely right. And I, and I’m not gonna share any information. But I just came back from a big conference in Amsterdam with one of our portfolio companies where we had a very similar experience and, and we have had, we believe that if things go the way they’re going to go, we have a multi billion dollar opportunity and so on our hands on several opportunity, we have the courage of our conviction to go down that Right, because of those kinds of experiences in the past, that have been formed us into, here’s where the market is going. The folks that want to buy us will, but you know, I won’t say bury us, but they certainly don’t know how to typically integrate these acquisitions very well into the organization that can recognize him.
Andy Paul
Correct?
Sean Sheppard
Yeah, well, those instances, sorry,
Andy Paul
No, go ahead. I was gonna make a point that was a digression, not not furthering the conversation. So
Sean Sheppard
that’s all right. We’re sales guys. We love to digress. So
At any point, at any rate, the point is, if you look at Amazon, they were not the first e-commerce player by any stretch of writing with doing I mean, just pick it right. I mean, you can look around you and rarely do you see something that was first to market that was able to sustain their position in the market over time. And so I found myself just wanting to try and take my learnings and just apply it to our framework for helping our companies find product market fit, as we like to say, and then just get very clear about three things that you need to go after, in order to build a lasting mover advantage. And there are three things that I noticed that, in the most successful, lasting companies come back over and over and over again. And so, the first one I think is most important is owning a use case. And I talked about ownership when I talked about these three things because I think there’s an intent that I don’t want it to be an arrogance of ownership. I want it to be a, you know, earned ownership. I want our mindset and our attitude to be that my job is to earn the right
through sweat equity.
own a piece of this use case of this particular customer In a particular market, and make the bet that if I can solve it deeply and correctly, and create real value through the course of that with this one customer or these two, or these three, or these four, but the same use case, that I can bet that there are many, many others like them in the marketplace, by then for my risk becomes execution risk, not product and technology risk. And so if I’m focused on that, I want to start by clearly defining the problem, which most of us so gloss over. And we don’t have clarity around, and then mutually working with that initial customer profile, to clearly deeply define the problem like Einstein used to say if you can’t explain it, well, you know, if you can’t tell them, You don’t understand it well enough, right.
Andy Paul
Yeah, and I think that by the same token, though, it’s not that a first mover can’t do that. But it’s interesting. Oftentimes they don’t.
Sean Sheppard
Yeah, they sided with them, and they stopped doing it.
Andy Paul
Well, they assume they’re right, just because they got the first one. And right. And I think that’s where often the downfall comes as they get started with the arrogance of saying, Well, yeah, I’ve got these logos, that’s, uh, this is the right thing. But it’s a moving target. And I got complacent.
Sean Sheppard
That’s right. And I think complacency is an example of it. You and I were talking off the air just beforehand, about future proofing. Right? And just generally about the innovation economy and how quickly things change and move right. And where I see things. And you and I talked about also using the term ambiguity as opportunity and I talk erasing ambiguity. And so we share a similar vision there. I think the point is, that when some change is introduced of any sort, it creates new problems and opportunities, right? So if we’re concerned that 40% of the workforce is going to be out of jobs because of robots and automation in the next 30 to 40 years, yes, they may be out of the current jobs. But every new innovation creates a whole new set of problems and challenges. Mm hmm. Which therefore means bringing this all back into focus is that the use case is constantly changing, right? And it’s changing faster now at a faster rate today than it ever has before. We know we know the statistics around things like you know, the average tenure on the s&p 519 70 was 75 years today, it’s about 10 to 12 writers. We know that Jeff Bezos even had the courage in the last quarterly shareholders meeting or maybe it was one prior to say I’m worried about whether or not Amazon’s gonna be around in 2035. Which is just a shocking thing for the market or anyone to really hear but it’s the truth and
Andy Paul
yeah, I mean, there’s this assumption of invulnerability with these, these big players and, and I remember, you know, back in the 90s, putting together this like portfolio for my, my IRA, which, on the advice of a, you know, advisor as well, you know, when this stock was some core companies that just aren’t going to go away, right. Yeah. And so those, those companies, you could probably predict like at&t, Motorola, Texas Instruments a circuit on the list. It’s like, Yeah, all of them have either gone away or been. Yeah, the name may still exist, what’s a completely separate company? I mean, all these things. It’s just like, and that was, yeah, that happened a matter of 10 years.
Sean Sheppard
You’re absolutely right. So the point is, that the use case is never static for an extended period of time. It’s constantly changing. But you do need to find that hook. My friend, al. author of the book, was hooked on how to build a headphone. As said, you have to find that one thing. What is that one singular use case that I can through sweat equity, learn, understand and have shared ownership alongside my early customers to ensure that I survive long enough to get to the next opportunity but never change that mindset that uses cases constantly moving. And I don’t know if we’ve talked about this before Andy but you My father was an officer at Intel Corporation and I was fortunate enough growing up to be in, you know, in dining rooms with Andy Grove and Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore. And Craig Barrett and Paul Otellini and Mike splinter and all these guys that all subscribed to the only Paranoid survive. Andy Grove right. Rob talked about constantly it was still one of the all time great books don’t know what the term paranoid scare you away. It was a positive and productive paranoia. That came from an engineering mindset and a Hungarian immigrant right. Who didn’t even speak English when it came to this? That said, we constantly have to be staying out in front of everyone and everything and all at all times. Right? And, and so, that is, to me the mindset of the leadership, and then the people that they put in place to execute against that has to be, we need to clearly define a use case, right? Now, let’s try to truly deeply, deeply, deeply solve it for all use cases, all user types, and all scenarios. And don’t focus on anything but that, like, we tell our companies sometimes if you’re not, you know, one of my partners, Andrew Golder loves to do this with founders. He says, I want you to take me through an entire day of your life, minute by minute. And, and I want you to tell me what you’re doing during those minutes. And then I want you to ask yourself a very simple yes or no question: is that thing focused on getting somebody to transfer money from their bank account to yours? Right. That’s simple. Right. So getting really focused, in order to do that, you’ve got to start you have to, you have to begin in this shared connection of Yeah, there’s a frickin problem here. And here’s what the problem is, how do we solve it, and then be focused wholly and exclusively on solving that problem. And then once you do, it creates those challenges, those learnings, those insights and those opportunities to change any number of things. Which brings us into that second thing, which is okay, now that you’ve figured out how to develop an environment where you can own a use case with your customer, how do you now own their thoughts and actions around it? Because we now live in this time, where, how we think is just as important as what we think. And, and the more I do this, and the more time I spend with smart, successful people, the more they focus on how people think went around it as opposed to just what they think. Yeah. And, and so you get to a point to where Okay, now that I’ve owned this use case, we’ve learned the following things based on that, what do we do about it? And who’s responsible for that? You and I were talking a little bit offline just about you coming back from this Gartner event where, you know, people are trying to figure out that the next thing is okay, how do I make good decisions with all this awesome information at my fingertips? That’s how to think, right? Work thing. Yep. So that’s now there’s thoughts and actions that have to be you know, performed by everybody involved, customer and yourself, and you have an opportunity as the person who helped define the problem, and develop a solution within that use case, to also come to the table with here’s how I’m thinking about what we do next based on what we did yesterday, and what we’ve learned and not be afraid to do that. And if you develop a strong enough
you’ve developed enough credibility through the course of executing against that problem with your customer, they’re going whether they say it or not, out loud, explicitly, they’re implying that you need to do this part next. Like, where’s the data? Show me works that like every technology solution always has reporting come last. There’s a reason for that. We don’t know what the hell’s happening until we actually start doing it. And then if you’re really good at it, the information you generate off of the use case solution is more valuable than the solution itself. Ultimately, yep. And so now it’s about Alright, now how do I come in and analyze and create an opportunity to change the way this use case is viewed and how it’s dealt with and what we can do next based on that. So those are the opportunities that come up from solving that problem. And oftentimes, we get static and weak because we want to think about everything at scale and we’re back to the total addressable market. It’s like okay, if I can do this in this way that generates this much revenue over this period of time with a compound annual growth rate of back. And here’s my CAC. LTV, right. It’s infinitely scalable, and blah. Yeah, yep. Exactly. And meanwhile, we’re not focused on making sure that as the use case evolves, our our, our approach towards owning it evolves with it, and therefore the thoughts and actions come from there.
Andy Paul
Well, it’s an interesting question that from, you know, from a sales perspective about owning that use case as the use case evolves. It has implications for the nature and the structure of your team.
Sean Sheppard
Yes.
Andy Paul
And so once you dig into that a little bit, because I think this is a part that, I think is, I see it as a sort of failure point. Oftentimes for smaller companies. They’re not as nimble as agile with their team makeup compared to them. evolving use cases.
Sean Sheppard
That’s right. That’s you’re very much right about that. sales organizations are wholly focused largely on acquisition, right as we like, modern term, close the deal, get the deal in the door. And because we’re so invested in that, we invest in marketing at the top of the funnel, we invest in sales development, beneath that we invest in, in account executives there, we might even invest in technical support and help to help us through a complex sale environment or highly technical one. And then we forget about customer implementation, onboarding, adoption, retention and growth. And then we’re late to the party trying to solve that. And we end up with churn and all those issues associated with that. The key here is to do what we call creating a functional learning organization out of the team responsible for owning that use case. So you have to, as you say, design an organization around the individual roles. responsibilities that you hypothesize are necessary the knowledge, skills and behaviors necessary to get through owning that learning about that use case, defining it, solving for it, owning it and then creating. And then when you get into step two, which is owning the customer’s thoughts and actions, you better have the right skill set there. It’s not necessarily the sales guy who’s going to be a girl is gonna be able to do that you need to do you might need to bring in a data scientist, you might need to bring in a digital analysts, you might need to bring in a subject matter expert, that’s the voice of the customer, you might need to bring in all three you might need to bring in You certainly early stage you have to bring in product development, Product Management, heavily into that process. And everybody has to be working through what we call a functional data driven learning loop, where there’s somebody responsible for driving that loop, but they’re bringing in people from the different areas of both sides of the organization to prioritize that.
Andy Paul
So Typically drives that functional learning loop.
Sean Sheppard
Well, in our companies, it’s always the person who’s responsible for the month for market development, whether that is the founder or co-founder.
It’s the first sales hire.
But it’s that person who is responsible for identifying and resourcing, to build that functional learning organization in the loop that’s associated with it. If it’s your first sales hire, then it’s not
Andy Paul
necessarily it’s not gonna be your run of the mill, individual contributor, it’s gonna be
Sean Sheppard
correct. There’s a set of characteristics and attributes that we look for in the person who’s responsible for taking something to someplace new for identifying, initializing that customer use case. It’s that hypothesis that we think we can help people with this problem in this way. And they can generate these kinds of results from that, right. It’s a very different person. It’s just who we are. And we’re talking about people who know how to brace ambiguity, they have a strong acumen for learning as you Call it continuous active learning Hmm. Race ambiguity, who has a strong business acumen, right? They understand how to how that problem affects and impacts that company’s business. So that person’s business or job, huh? Know how to articulate that with strong communication skills, right. They also know how to speak to engineers and humans as I like to joke.
Andy Paul
So, this person is sort of the, you know, the term that’s been used in the past sort of the Renaissance type,
Sean Sheppard
right, exactly Mark Leslie’s term and Charles Holloway’s term of the Renaissance rap. And in, in large corporations who are trying to innovate. We call it the role of the commercialization leader. And it’s actually a role that growth is corporate and we have a big innovation practice now where we manage venture capital for corporations. We also help them create open innovation, business models where they can run their own business Industry led accelerators, great technology and talent from outside their community to help them work on disruptive and adjacent innovations. But more importantly, the true differentiator is as we teach them how to commercialize new innovations. And it starts with this whole same framework that we use to help our startups take a product to market, right? It’s that Renaissance rep role, and it evolves it into what we call the commercialization leader. And now we’re starting to put that out into the world and tell the story better. Yeah, because they don’t exist in these companies. Andy, you know, as well as I do, the people that are running these big organizations are not the ones that started them, and have a very different mindset to begin with. Right and they want somebody who, who is part product part market part business, embraces ambiguity, has an entrepreneurial spirit, can talk to humans and engineers, and drives this learning loop and has enough exposure to every aspect of the business to know how to pull all that together.
Andy Paul
Well, right and that’s the critical point. I think as people are looking at initial sales hires where they make so many big mistakes this is a person that has those attributes to talk about, they still need to close business. Yes, that’s, it’s it’s great to do all these other things and a half, two, but the critical thing that sometimes companies forget is either they hire someone that wants to be a manager, because you sort of described something that is of a managerial role, with that sort of acumen and insight and ability to sort of take it to the next level. Your player coach they want to play to they got to play they gotta be able to bring the business and I remember that one company has with this hard to start a division. And you have a CEO, I said, Yes, sir. What’s the charter? Where should I start? company, I have no products that technology is that anywhere you want, as long as the customer pays for the development of the product, go sell them to anyone. But those that type of things as you know, we had to go define everything. But just not to bring customers in?
Sean Sheppard
Well, sure. And so and so when you’re told that, does that send a tingle up your spine is complete excitement. I can’t wait to try this. Does it make you know? Does it make your heart fall into your stomach like it does with a lot of people? And that right there? how you react in that moment tells me who you are. Yeah, doesn’t mean you’re a bad person that you’re not stage. All right. That’s why we call it stage relevance, right? It’s about the turn. It’s about finding somebody who stays relevant. And it’s about that dynamic of taking something someplace new. It matters if it’s big because it’s not about the stage of the company. It’s about the stage of the product in a market. And that’s why it’s working so well in those in the corporate environments where we’ve applied it. And oftentimes, like we’ve been able to find successfully, we’ve been able to find internal hypose high potentials, large organizations that, that raise their hand want to do this and then when they’re properly vetted, screen and then they’re they’re sitting too in a box with with with one of the growth x commercialization leaders learning this process over six months to a year hmm they’re doing great, huh? Now it’s becoming a known role and function inside business units of different organizations. It’s not just It doesn’t just doesn’t doesn’t just sit in r&d, or in emerging technology or any of those areas. It actually sits in these areas.
Andy Paul
Sean Sean’s off to handle a canine. canine emergency.
Sean Sheppard
Yeah, sorry, that’s a big German Shepherd running around. But, they sit successfully inside of business units, and they’re tied to the p&l and supporting the digital transformation, as we call it a business model transformation. They’re launching technology products or they’re changing business models in a way that has never been done before.
Andy Paul
Right. Have a little dog
Sean Sheppard
that is tamale, the Chihuahua
Andy Paul
Which one sets off with the other one? There’s actually a third dog that sets him both off
Sean Sheppard
the rescue of named Laura. Okay. All right. She’s the one that initiates it. All right.
Andy Paul
So while I dig into this issue, stage relevance because again, we were talking a little bit earlier before starting recording about one of my daily email notes I’d send out about future proofing, and stage relevance really relates to that right? Because I love the idea of stage relevance, because people have to understand that as companies evolve as use cases evolve and so on that it’s okay. You may not evolve with that, right? You may have an area of expertise within the sales profession that is, but even that is going to evolve, right the way that we do things where you reach out to customers, right? We talked to them, it’s on that continuous valve even in that stage that you might be a specialist in So you need to keep, keep improving, keep learning. But yeah, I learned that lesson in my career that, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s okay, you’re not not always gonna be the best at everything even though you want to be the best at everything. And no decision has to be made as, as a manager of that company say, Oh yeah, who’s who’s the most relevant person to put on this
Sean Sheppard
who’s most suited for, you know, up for taking something someplace. And then who’s most suited for leading, you know, leading in driving that the the, either the, either the proactive change in getting out front or or responding to it very quickly. And if you want to last you’re going to have to do that a lot more now than you did 15 2030 4050 years ago, because the rate of change and the pace at which things change now is never got has never been faster, and it will continue to, to accelerate. And so you have to be prepared for that.
Andy Paul
Yeah, well, I think, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think this is against the backdrop we were talking about, this is the way that you prepare yourself for that, as you have to keep learning. You know, if you’re a seller, you know, if you’re selling at a market, I sort of use the analogy sometimes is that you work with customers, I’m sure you see this all the time this person puts together a business plan. And the rate of growth of projecting their business plan is less than the rate of growth of the business or the industry they’re in. Yes. And you’re saying, well, how’s this gonna work? Right? This is not sustainable if you’re growing slower than your market. Well, if you’re a salesperson, the same thing is true. If you’re evolving less rapidly, or if you’re growing less rapidly than the way the markets that you’re serving are growing, then it’s inevitable. Eventually, you’re going to fall too far behind. And you have to look for a change in profession or whatever. And that’s your choice you want to make, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Now I mean, it’s never been easier to learn. And this is the big hurdle. And be interested to get your advice on what you’d give people. This is the big hurdle these days for sales people in every profession, but we’re talking about sales here today, because it’s not purely a sales issue. But how are you evolving? How are you learning? What are you committing? Because it’s not you can’t count on your company to do it for you. It doesn’t matter how big your company is, and you can’t count on them to keep your current job. This is something you got to do yourself.
Sean Sheppard
Absolutely. So I’ve always been my fundamental philosophy in sales generally has always been the same. There’s no distinction between personal development and professional development. If you develop the personal development profession, right. I don’t there’s ever been a time in history, where that’s been more prevalent and more necessary and more critical than it is today. Hmm. And so, at the same time, like you said, it’s also never been easier to learn so this is just simply about changing some habits and you don’t even have to do this at scale. You can do this very simply. For example, I don’t listen to I don’t listen to music in the car or talk radio. You know, I listen to you. Fast I listen to Rogan, I listen to I listened to you know, I listen to books I read, read bleakest when I’m
Andy Paul
when I’m reading a book summary for people that don’t know about bliss.
Sean Sheppard
Those of us who’ve been booked summary junkies forever because I was on the old soundview and an executive summary things back in the day blankest I’ve been a bleakest user, so I only wish I could, you know, had an opportunity to invest in them early on, they’re based out of Germany didn’t know they existed until I found them. Too late, but an incredible place because 90% of books are fillers designed by publishers to set to sell at a higher price. What are the 10% key takeaways from every book that you can absolutely employ? That’s what blink is. It distills it down to that first so there’s a page. Yeah, look, and I was never somebody, I was never a voracious reader in the traditional sense. Like, I don’t read nonfiction. I read, I read, I mean, I don’t read fiction, excuse me, I only read the biographies. I read history, I read, write, I smell, felt and personal development. And I just, those are the things I love. I’m constantly interested in learning more about why I do what I do. Because I’m just not conscious. So there’s a lot of different ways for all of you to digest information and constantly learn from it. But you have to have that initial mindset that says that this is this is I’m doing this for the carrot, not for the stick, not doing this out of fear. I’m doing this out of this opportunity to learn and grow and be better. And then and then I think you’ll see instantly if you have the awareness to pay attention to it, how your life will just slowly start to change in a very positive way.
Andy Paul
It has to be a deliberate commitment. And I think this is the example I use, which is Yeah, turn off the Bachelor. Yes. Or whatever. housewives have real housewives or whatever, and
Sean Sheppard
record the football game and watch it later with no commercial
Andy Paul
with no commercials, and you’ve, you’ve created time for reading. Absolutely.
Sean Sheppard
There’s a lot of ways to do it now. And that’s the point is it’s never been easier to get access to that information.
Andy Paul
And that time to do it, quite frankly.
Sean Sheppard
Right. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. And it’s not just sales related content, although that is where you should start. Yeah, well, that drives, you know, what it is to be human what and what and how you can improve yourself? Yes. So the response that you get from the rest of the world is better and more valuable for you, your family and your community. That was
Andy Paul
absolutely my consent is better. So we’re gonna end on we’re gonna end on that note then we’re gonna get
Sean Sheppard
to that we only got through two of them
Andy Paul
we’ll come back we’ll come back it won’t it won’t be as long this time we’ll have you back well
Sean Sheppard
the problem is is that you and I should have started recording it you know, when we first
Andy Paul
That’s usually the case. We talked for half our good stuff, but of course we had some personal stuff in there too but alright, so for people that want to learn more and talk about the new sort of self serve growth x that people can get access to as well.
Sean Sheppard
Yeah, growth x calm, the letter X attached to growth and then g x Academy comm is growth x Academy and you can learn whether you are an entrepreneur, you are a seller, you’re a corporation. You’re You’re a government. We do a lot of civic innovation work these days as well. There’s a lot of different ways that you can take advantage of this. But we’ve just open sourced our core market acceleration programming content, hashtag gx MSP, you can find it on Twitter there, you can just go to grow dexCOM And subscribe. And every Wednesday or Thursday and your inbox, you’re going to get a sequential piece of content that talks about the next step and market development. How you can apply that and what you’re currently doing. And then any and all the relevant tools and documents that go with it.
Andy Paul
Yeah, and there’s a little bit of a backlog. I think you’re like on number 14, I signed up.
Sean Sheppard
Yeah, our intention is to do 50 of these and, you know, we’ve got 50 in the can, and we’ll do one a week and we will continue to evolve and update it. It’s designed to be evergreen content. Based on what we learned today. We’ll update and make some changes as we go. But this is the preview we call our blog to book series because eventually this will become our book. That’s how you do it.
Andy Paul
Who’s done that twice with books? It’s the way to do it.
Sean Sheppard
Yes, I think I remember somebody very smart on the other end of this call telling me that
Andy Paul
muscle right with the purpose of mine, so
Sean Sheppard
That’s right. That’s right.
Andy Paul
All right. Well, Shawn, as always fantastic talk with you and I look forward to it again soon.
Sean Sheppard
Thank you, Andy.
Andy Paul
Okay, friends that will accelerate for the week. First of all, as always, I want to thank you for joining me. And I wanna thank my guest, Shawn shepherd. Join me again next week as my guest will be Stu Hynek. We’re going to talk about stew’s excellent new book, get a meeting. It’s a follow up to his previous book which was also excellent titled How to get a meeting with anyone and and the soccer recession student I’ve talked about some of the strategies from his new book that will help you get that meeting. So be sure to join us then. And before you go, don’t forget to check out the sales house. Sales house is my own growth training platform for b2b sellers just like you, if you’re a seller who’s reached the limits of what the supposes science of selling can do for you, and you’re interested in learning about the art of winning the giant the sales house, learn how to master the human element of selling to crush your numbers. So for more information, visit the sales house.com that is the sales house.com. So thanks again for joining me this week. Until next week, I’m your host, Andy Paul. Good selling everyone.
