This is the transcript of this episode:

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Mark Shriner [0:01]:
Welcome to the Grow Past Podcast, where we talk with leading sales, marketing, and personal growth experts about how companies can accelerate sales, optimize marketing, and grow their businesses. Fast. Let's go. Hey, John, how are you?

John Barrows [0:15]:
Good, Mark. How you doing?

Mark Shriner [0:18]:
Pretty good. Pretty good. I'm in an Airbnb in the middle of Croatia. Croatia, nine o'clock at night. Yeah, no, it’s a beautiful country. In fact, I mean, this is totally not related to our conversation, but we spent most of the time on the coast. But now we’re in the inland area around what they call the Sea Lakes and waterfall area. It’s a completely different country, and it’s just amazing. Highly recommended. Whereabouts are you located?

John Barrows [0:45]:
I’m in Boston.

Mark Shriner [0:46]:
Boston, yeah.

John Barrows [0:48]:
Yeah, Boston, but I’ve been all over the place. And Croatia is actually one of the places I haven’t been yet. So what brought you to Croatia?

Mark Shriner [0:56]:
My son was playing football, or soccer, in Zagreb for a semi-pro team. And then also, our development team for the SaaS company that I’m running is based in Budapest. So I go out there to make sure things are getting developed, you know. So I’m using that as an excuse. And then I got the family over here this week. Next week, I’ll be flying back. But I thought, you know what, this is a good time to do it and record a podcast with you. Hey, I gotta ask you, you know, you are CEO of JB Sales, you’re the host of the Make It Happen Monday podcast, you’ve written books on sales, you also have 397,000 followers on LinkedIn. So I gotta ask, I want to talk to you about JB Sales and your podcast and your sales—why you got into sales training. But before that, how did you get that many followers? And then talk a little bit about the value that allows you to bring to your audience, but also does it help you with your sales training business?

John Barrows [1:58]:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I found my number a little while back; I was member 36,541. So we’re up to almost a billion people on the platform. And I didn’t even know what it was when I first got it. Like, I wish I could go back and find the first person that invited me to just say thank you, right. But I think it’s, first of all, I’d been on it for a long time, obviously, right. And what happened was, I was consistent on it. And so when they all of a sudden turned on the follow button as opposed to just the connect button, all of a sudden, my connections went through the roof. But I will say, I think, and I talked about this recently with somebody, I forgot who, but I feel fortunate that I was in the networking world and in the face-to-face business world before LinkedIn came out or before I really started using it. And the reason was because early in my career, I just did so much networking, and going to events, and going to networking groups. And so I understood what the networking game was all about—referrals and, you know, how to givers gain with all this other stuff. And so when LinkedIn came out, I was like, “Wow, great, like, now I can use this.” And I did get a lot of people, when I went off on my own, to be like, “Oh, man, we’ll get you thousands of followers, just let us do it.” And I’m like, “I don’t want arbitrary, random mass followers. I want people who are actually going to be engaged and interested.” So I just decided to take the methodical, slow, boring route and just was constantly posting and sharing and connecting with people on LinkedIn, and eventually got to the range that I’m at right now. But when you ask about how valuable it’s been, it’s been insanely valuable. I mean, I don’t know—if you’re a sales rep and you’re not on LinkedIn, if you’re not building your brand and that type of—I don’t know what you’re doing, quite frankly. Well, I’ll take that back. The caveat here is, as long as your audience is on LinkedIn. If your audience isn’t on LinkedIn, then obviously try something different.

Mark Shriner [3:57]:
If you’re selling retirement plans to people who’ve never been on LinkedIn because they were just kind of a little late in their career to consider that, that’s probably not your thing, right? You need that face-to-face contact or something else. But let me ask you, because you talked about the traditional, old-school kind of networking. I’ve always told the people that I’ve been working with, the number one rule is: get the meeting, get the meeting, get the meeting. And these days, with a lot of post-COVID virtual everything, it’s changed. But even LinkedIn, you used to be able to email people and request a meeting, and now people are kind of averse to that. You used to be able to reach out via LinkedIn. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how LinkedIn has evolved and some of the lessons learned in terms of how to use it effectively.

John Barrows [4:51]:
Yeah, I kind of said something like, apparently, slightly controversial the other day on this topic because I just straight up said, I don’t think LinkedIn is a sales platform. I don’t think it’s a direct selling platform. I think it’s a networking platform. I think it’s a relationship platform. I think it’s a branding platform. But I don’t think it’s a direct sale—a, you know, I’m gonna go right after your InMail and be like, “Hey, what’s up, Mark? You know, love to talk to you about this.” The success ratios on those are terrible. So the way I’m looking at all—and yeah, has LinkedIn shifted? Now it’s—I mean, it’s all sales all the time at this point, right? I mean, it’s just, my feed at least, is just filled with sales stuff, like sales tips and all that. It’s like, great, thanks. But so I rarely use it to learn something new. But I do use it to engage, and I do use it to share my content and build my brand. And that’s where I think all of us—whether it’s a cold call or email these days—outbound in general is brutal. Like, I don’t care who you sell to, I don’t care what you sell. Outbound’s always been hard, but I think now, it’s harder than ever. And so I look at—I think all sales reps need to be mini marketers, thinking of every single thing that we do as an impression point, and ideally a positive impression point. Because I read some stat recently that only like three to five percent of anybody’s addressable market is actually in market for their services, right? The other ninety-five percent of people are at some continuum of zero and never up to maybe, right? So my thing is, I just want to be there when they’re ready to engage. And I’ll be opportunistic, obviously making some calls and doing some cadences. But really, at the end of the day, the collection of stuff, the email, the call, the video, the LinkedIn message—all those things compile to create a sense of familiarity. And therefore, when it is time to have that conversation, when it is time to reach out to them or have them reach out to us, we’re the ones they talk to.

Mark Shriner [6:53]:
So if you could just give three tips for people to use LinkedIn more effectively, what would they be?

John Barrows [7:02]:
I’ll start with the brand. Everybody’s always wondering, like, “What do you do on LinkedIn? What do you post? I don’t have anything interesting to say.” So first of all, drop that. Second of all, you don’t have to be the content creator on LinkedIn; you have to be the content curator. Because if you think about it, Mark, right? You say I write a blog, right? So it takes me an hour to SEO it, whatever. And then I share it out there on social. And you and I are connected. So you read my blog, and you like it. So you share it. “Hey, really interesting blog here by John. My three takeaways were X, Y, Z,” right? Then you share it out there. And then somebody you’re connected to reads my blog because you shared it. And they get value out of it. Who do they thank? You. They don’t say, “Thanks, John, for writing the article.” I might get another follower, don’t get me wrong. But they’re not going to say, “Thanks, John, for writing the article.” They’re going to say, “Thanks, Mark, for sharing the article.” So you get all the credit. I did all the work. So this way, you can build an extremely authentic brand with the priority of learning first. So if you figure out—here’s an example. Say you sell to CISOs in healthcare. Go on to LinkedIn, do a search for CISOs in healthcare. Just that, that fit maybe in your parameters, or whatever it is, or maybe some of the bigger ones. Go find the five or six thought leaders in that space who are posting and sharing content about what it’s like to be a CISO in healthcare. Consume their content. When you find something that you learn something, then share that content with your context, “Hey, really interesting article here.” That way, your primary goal has been met, you’ve learned something. But your secondary goal of, you know, followers and likes, yeah, okay. If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. We actually just talked to a former rep of mine, and she’s like, “John, I just feel like all the engagement is going down. I’ve been at this for over a year now, and I thought I was getting some trajectory, and now it’s going down.” I’m like, “Surely, this is kind of like the housing market. You gotta play the long game.” If you think that—you know, if you’re gonna worry about the ups and downs of trying to manipulate the algorithm, you’re not going to win. That said, Mark, and I’ll send this to you, remind me, so you can put it in the show notes. I did come across an article on the algorithm of LinkedIn and what are the best practices to do on LinkedIn. So I did finally find something that is up-to-date and talks about how to engage, when to post, what to do to maximize your exposure. So first things first is share content that you learn from. Second thing is, find your link. My favorite one is if you’re using like a Sales Navigator or something, you can put in lists. There’s—you can create your demographic list as many employees or whatever. But there’s a filter in LinkedIn Sales Navigator, my favorite, it’s called past companies. So what I would recommend you do is take your top ten best customers. Okay, so what customers are your absolute top ten best? Okay. Then go in and create a search for the profiles, right? So you’re not looking for those customers because they’re already customers. But you create a list of, you know, ten to however many employees, revenues, whatever. And then there’s a section called past company. Put your ten best companies in past company. So say it’s, for me, it’s VPs of sales who used to work at Salesforce. Because I trained Salesforce from 2010 to 2018, and I trained every single rep that went through that building for eight years. So if you worked at Salesforce, you took my training, and I guarantee you liked it. So if you move to another company, that’s like shooting fish in a barrel for me because everybody thinks, you know, we talked about triggers, and what do you use to reach out to people. Everybody thinks that a new job is a great time to reach out to somebody. And I’m here to tell you it’s not. It’s a terrible time to reach out to somebody unless they are familiar with your solution. Because what executive do you know in their right mind is going to make a decision on some new technology as the first decision they make at a business? None of them, okay. But what do they do? They all bring their friends. Like, they bring the people they know, they bring the vendors they know and they can trust. So I have a search, it’s all my ideal customer profile characteristics and says past company Salesforce. And then I get alerted every time somebody goes from Salesforce to a VP of sales at a new tech startup that fits my exact profile, and I send one email to them. “Hey, Mark, I see you’re at Salesforce. I’m guessing you took my training. Let me know if as you get settled here, you want to set the world on fire and do it with your new crew. Let’s go.” I got a thirty-two percent response rate from just that one email. Because it’s relevant. So that filter is one of my favorites. And then I’d say the third one is—I’m going to go on the opposite side of a wrecking ball, not what to do, but what not to do. The fastest way to get out of somebody’s inbox and get disconnected is to connect with them. And then as soon as they accept your connection, you immediately pitch slap them. You know, you’re immediately like, “Oh, thanks, Mark, for the—you know, thanks for connecting, Mark,” and then boom, it’s like this page of crap that’s pitching you, that’s not personalized at all. It’s just about whatever. That is the fastest way in my book to get disconnected from. Because if you do that, I will go find you. I will open up your profile. I will disconnect, and I will block you. Going back to I don’t think LinkedIn is a sales, a direct selling machine.

Mark Shriner [12:44]:
Yeah, I mean, I had some amazing success with LinkedIn selling directly, I don’t know, maybe six, seven, eight years ago, but for the last couple of years, I just don’t see it. And I totally agree with you. So you can curate content, help people to learn important lessons, point out, “Hey, have you seen this article? This is relevant to what you’re doing.” The past—would you say the past companies?

John Barrows [13:09]:
Yeah, I think it’s called—I think it’s called a filter, actually. It’s amazing.

Mark Shriner [13:14]:
Yeah. And then, yeah, totally. You can’t—I mean, everybody’s just getting flooded with so many messages. And if you overdo it, and do the hard sell, you’re just gonna get—like you said, you can just block the conversation. And then you’re not gonna get through anymore. And what’s really annoying is, if I don’t respond to you, and then you keep just pinging me. It’s like, come on, okay, fine, I’m just gonna block you. You know, I mean, I don’t have the time to write, because I don’t like to be abrupt and rude and say, like, “I’m sorry, I’m not interested.” But I just don’t—you know, you kind of take it, but yeah, so it’s your right. And, but when it comes to the—and I don’t want to spend too much more time on LinkedIn, but I would say that when it comes to sharing information, there is so much information coming in every single day. So, what are your thoughts on how much is too much? And, you know, how do we moderate that?

John Barrows [14:11]:
Yes, good luck. I don’t think you moderate it. I think you just gotta keep curating, curate and curating down to the point where the stuff that’s in your feed is the stuff you want in your feed, right? So this is why I think it’s important to—so here’s another little small tip on your LinkedIn profile. If I look at your LinkedIn profile, in the bottom right, I think it still is, there’s a bell. And if I click that bell, every time you post something, I’m going to see it. So what I would do is I would go get my top twenty-five customer list, for instance, and I would put all my target personas on a list like that, and I would follow and I would click the bell on every one of their profiles. So anytime they posted anything, I was getting an alert about it. So I think it’s just like anything, I mean, if you think of Facebook and Instagram, like Instagram, when you first got it was like, “What the hell is going on here? Like, random things. That’s weird. I didn’t want to look at that.” But the more you like, the more you, you know, whatever, the more stuff’s going to be more and more relevant to your inbox. So I think the same thing is for your content on LinkedIn. You follow the people that you want to follow and unfollow the people that are not providing content, not providing value. And then you start to create your base, you’re basically your own news feed. You know, I actually use a product called Feedly. So it’s F-E-E-D-L-Y. And Feedly is just an RSS aggregator, right? So it’s basically if there’s five, say, there’s five or six sales blogs you like reading. Well, usually you have to go to five different sales websites, or go to, you know, have five or six different emails to hit your inbox. In Feedly, you create a folder in Feedly called, you know, sales blogs or something like that. You put them all in there, and then you just kind of skim through all the headlines. So that’s a way I actually take a lot of what I see on LinkedIn. As far as people who are posting really good stuff, I then go see if they have like a newsletter or something like that, or a blog. And then I’ll set up a Feedly account for those type of people where I can curate that information more directly.

Mark Shriner [16:03]:
And how do you budget your time? I know you’re incredibly busy. And you know, the whole thing is, we should always be trying to—what’s the saying?—sharpen the saw or always be learning and stuff like that. So you need to kind of dedicate a certain amount of time towards that, you know, reading what other people are writing, and so on, and just kind of learning. But we’re all caught up in the day-to-day, you know, “Hey, I’ve got this call, this call, this call, I’ve got this podcast with Mark,” blah, blah, blah. So do you set aside a specific time every day or a couple hours every week to say, “Hey, I’m just gonna just kind of look through all this content?”

John Barrows [16:39]:
Yep. Yeah, so to me, a lot of success and everything else is about routines, like creating routines. So you do it consistently, right? A lot. And I’ll share this towards prospecting because I’ll share with you how I combined LinkedIn and scanning through stuff with my prospecting efforts. So for prospecting, as an example, if you treat prospecting as an event, which a lot of senior sales reps do, and myself included back in the day, where it’s like, you know what, I got too many things going on. Tuesday, Thursday afternoon, that’s when I’m going to do my prospecting from two to four o’clock, that’s when I’m going to do it, right. And then your week goes, and then Thursday comes and you, you know, in tune at two o’clock comes up, and what are you looking at? You’re looking at a nice two-hour chunk that doesn’t have any client meetings. Nobody’s bothering you, right? So you’re like, “Alright, so either you can do with the machine later.” But then you sit there and say, “Okay, either I don’t want to do prospecting because I got other things to do that are more important.” So it doesn’t happen. Or they go down that rabbit hole for half an hour, forty-five, fifty minutes before they even send one email. And that ain’t worth it, right? The key is having a routine. The analogy I use is just like working out, right? I’m a terrible worker-outer because I’m an event-driven worker-outer. You know what I mean? Like, if I’m going on vacation in a few months, right, I’m at the gym, I’m eating good. I’m trying to get all well in shape. And then as soon as I come home, I come home from the vacation like, “Ah, pizza, beer.” “Oh, summer’s coming. Don’t want to look like a whale.” Here we go. Oktoberfest. I know that if I just woke up every morning, did a few pushups, a few sit-ups, and hit the Peloton for like 15-20 minutes, I’d maintain, right. But I’m a train wreck because this is how I actually work out. Prospecting is the same thing. So what I encourage—what I do is I have an internal clock, unfortunately, these days, that wakes me up at five o’clock. So from 5:30 to 6:00, I work out a little bit. And then from 6:00 to 6:30, I go grab coffee and a little bit of breakfast. And then from 7:00 to 7:30, I sit down and I pick one account to prospect into. So one of my tier-one accounts, I spend thirty minutes doing a bunch of research, going super deep, trying to understand what their challenges are, and trying to map out a seven to ten-touch cadence, if you will. That’s one account once a day. And then the other thirty minutes is when I scan through data feeds on social stuff. So I got my LinkedIn tabs, I got all these different things. And all I’m looking for is either to learn something, obviously, or to see if I can kind of pick up on a trigger or something that would prompt me to reach out to that person because of whatever situation they’re in. So basically for an hour a day, I do super high-quality prospecting, and I do my social selling, quote unquote, and I build my brand all at the same time.

Mark Shriner [19:26]:
That’s awesome. And you’ve been doing it enough years that after a while, it just becomes kind of ingrained, right? It’s just routine. That’s what you just—

John Barrows [19:36]:
Yeah, that’s the hardest thing about a routine is getting to the point where it turns into a routine, right? Because it takes, I think it’s like twenty-one days to create a habit. If you did something twenty-one days in a row, there’s some Indian proverb thing that talks about how if you do something twenty-one days in a row, it creates a habit. Most people give up before that twenty-one days though, because they’re just like, “I don’t have time for this. I got too many other things.” So yeah, I’ve been doing it for a while, but a lot of it is just, again, discipline. We all—let’s put it this way. We all have a morning routine. All of us do.

Mark Shriner [20:08]:
Some people’s routines suck.

John Barrows [20:11]:
Yeah, well, yeah, there’s another one. But I’m not suggesting you add something to your routine. I suppose I’m suggesting you replace something that is not as valuable. Like, for me, I used to get up in the morning, I would check my fantasy leagues, you know, and get all pissed off because I suck at fantasy. And then I’d read the paper or I’d watch the news. And I’d get super pissed off because nothing’s happening in the news. So inevitably, I was always starting my day in a negative mentality. Now I’m purposeful with that mentality. Now I follow my clients, I follow the news that’s relevant to my industry, not just the news. Right. So it—but it takes a while to get there. It’s not easy, no question about it.

Mark Shriner [20:51]:
I mean, what I’m hearing is that, you know, you invest a little in yourself. You said, you started off with a little bit of a workout. And then you do some prospecting, which is investing in yourself, in your career, right? You’re not jumping right into social. I mean, I remember the times where—and I’m still tempted once in a while—just grab the phone. It’s like the security blanket. I woke up and, “Oh, do I really want to get up and do the workout? Or I can just grab the phone and look at Instagram?” Yeah, you know, and like that. But I know that, you know, at three o’clock in the afternoon that day, I’m gonna feel like, I got a big L on my forehead because I didn’t get up and do my workout and, you know, do my reading, do my journaling, or whatever it is. Because I am a big believer in investing myself first, okay. Myself doesn’t just mean me. It can be also building my career which prospecting, personal development all comes into play. So let me ask you this. When did you decide that you wanted to go from being, you know, a sales leader to becoming a full-time sales trainer and building a whole business around that?

John Barrows [21:55]:
I never really decided, quite frankly. I kind of fell into it. And it stuck. And so it’s kind of like sales in general, like most people don’t go to university to be a sales, you know, to get their degree in sales. They just end up in sales, right? So for me, what happened was my first job was DeWalt. Second was Xerox. Third was a startup with a few friends of mine, an IT services startup. And I was 24, so I had no idea what I was doing. So I took every training I could. I took Sandler, Miller Heiman, Taz, SPIN, all over the room. And I came across this group called Basho. And they were here in Boston. And I just—the trainer who delivered the session blew my mind. Jeff Hoffman, he’s my mentor to this day. And I was like, “Oh my God.” Finally, not only was he engaging, but the content was super tactical. And it wasn’t this big theory about selling or some BS roleplay that I had to do. It was real. So I actually used the content that he had trained us to help grow our company. We ended up being the fastest growing company in Massachusetts for a few years in a row. And then we sold off to Staples, right? So Staples bought us. And I thought that was a really fun, unique opportunity. Wrong. I am not a corporate guy by any stretch of the imagination. I basically burned out there.

Mark Shriner [23:06]:
I see your T-shirt right there. I can tell you, you got corporate guy written all over you.

John Barrows [23:11]:
No, I have no filter, and I don’t play in politics. So after a little while, Staples offered me another position. They fired me. Yeah. And so I was looking for a job, and Basho came knocking. And they said, “Do you want to be a trainer?” And I was like, “No.” And they’re like, “Why not?” And I’m like, “Well, I don’t like trainers.” Most trainers I had come across up until that point in my career were either failed sales professionals or professional presenters, right? If you can’t do, you teach it type of thing. And I didn’t want to be one of those guys. But what was interesting was, I got the opportunity. And I came home and I talked to my wife about it. And I was like, “I don’t know. Like, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be at this point. Because IT services firm, that was what I did. But I had no plan B. I wasn’t looking at anything else. And so then when I got fired from there, and I was looking for it, I was like, “Am I an IT sales guy? Is that what I am? Gross. I don’t even like the IT space really all that much.”

Mark Shriner [24:07]:
That’s it, you sales guy like clients of yours, right?

John Barrows [24:13]:
Yeah, I mean, like computers and stuff. Like, I didn’t care. Like, I loved the work that we did. But I didn’t care about the computers and stuff like that. So she was the one who kind of helped me because we looked back at my career, and she’s like, “Alright, well, why? Why have you been successful in every single job you’ve had, right? Why were you one of the top reps at? Let’s start with DeWalt.” I was like, “I don’t know.” Well, DeWalt’s products were pretty damn badass. Like, they’re cool. It wasn’t hard for me to talk about them. But—and then she said, “Well, okay, well then what about Xerox? Why were you one of the top reps at Xerox?” I was like, “I don’t know. So I didn’t give a shit about copiers.” But I genuinely believed at the time that Xerox was the best copier company in the industry. So it wasn’t hard for me to represent them. For my company, I obviously, I believed not in the computers but in the people, right. So it then it dawned on me that all I have to do is go find something that I believed in. And that’s where it kind of a light bulb went off. As far as it didn’t matter what I sold, it mattered that I believed in what I sold. Can I—anybody listening to this, please, I beg you, the best—the one thing that you can do to be successful in sales is have a belief in what you do. And I mean that. You can be successful, you can make money in sales if you don’t believe it. But if you want to stay in this game, and you want to build a career around this, you gotta go find products and services you can believe in and have pride in.

Mark Shriner [25:28]:
I’m so glad you said that. I wrote a book on sales. And the foundation I say is product knowledge and product belief. And they’re kind of intertwined. Because if you don’t really know the product, maybe your belief is going to be superficial or trying to build on sand. But if you really understand it, and that drives the belief, it’s so easy to go out and have that kind of engaged conversation with people because you’re like, “I’ve got something that’s totally awesome. Excuse me, tell me what you’re looking for. Maybe my thing will fit. And if it doesn’t, I’ll introduce something else. But I’m telling you what, I got something awesome.” You know that enthusiasm is contagious, as I say.

John Barrows [26:10]:
That’s what—well, somebody told me this early in my career, and I believe it to this day, that sales is the transfer of enthusiasm. Like, if you believe in what you do, it’s still true to this day, people buy on emotion, they back it up with facts, right. So if I believe in what I sell, then it’s about transferring that enthusiasm. But to your point, it’s got to be the right client and those types of things. So going back to connecting that to Basho. When I was like, “I don’t want to be a trainer.” I was like, “Well, I love the training. It worked really well for me.” And then I went through the interview process. And I remember I called my mom because she’s been a career counselor forever. And I’ve had a Myers-Briggs since I was like 12. And I said, “Ma, I got this weird opportunity to be a trainer. I never really thought of it. Like, what do you think about that?” Right? And she just starts laughing. And she goes, “John Michael,” she’s the only one that calls me John Michael, she goes, “John Michael, I never wanted to tell you what to do with your career. But if there’s anybody who I felt would be good at training and coaching and everything, it was you.” And I was like, “What? Really?” So I’m like, “Alright.” So I went to Barnes & Noble, and I bought “Training for Dummies,” no joke, bought the book “Training for Dummies,” because I’ve never trained before, anything like that. And you open up the first page, and there’s like 10 characteristics that says like, “How do you know you’re cut out to be a trainer?” And when I tell you, Mark, every single one of those characteristics landed with me, I was like,

Mark Shriner [27:36]:
That is so awesome. How did that—you finally like, “Oh my God, I found my thing.”

John Barrows [27:43]:
Yeah, apparently, I’m supposed to be doing this. And then I effectively took—it was like a fish to water, man. It was not hard for me. Because I had stories to tell of the training that I used and how it helped me. I believed in the product more than anything, it was helping people. It was sales. I mean, I get to sell sales to salespeople, are you out of your mind? You know what I mean? Like, I don’t have to sit there with CISOs and procurement people and accountants—no offense to any of them, but I don’t really enjoy having those conversations. They aren’t interesting to me. I’m all about like, let’s figure out how we can make more money so all those people can get paid. Right? And that’s where I just took off.

Mark Shriner [28:21]:
So I want to talk to you about, you know, what, what do you train when you’re doing sales training? And I’d like to start that with, I noticed on your LinkedIn profile that you, there’s something there that says something like, you help salespeople win more sales by selling authentically. It’s something like that. Let’s start with that: selling authentically. And then let’s go into how your courses are structured, etc.

John Barrows [28:51]:
Yeah, I mean, look, if there is one superpower I guess I have, according to feedback, is the authenticity factor here. You mentioned it just in your little talk about your book, right? I don’t think sales is about convincing anybody of anything. I think sales is about helping people solve problems or achieve goals. That’s it. And I love helping people solve problems and achieve goals, right. And so when—your second question I can get to—what was the first part of it though?

Mark Shriner [29:23]:
Well, it’s selling authentically, I mean.

John Barrows [29:27]:
So the authentic part of it, it just comes back to again, going back to believing in what you sell. Don’t be a douche. You know what I mean? Don’t try to convince anybody of anything. But there’s a process to it, right? There’s a structure to it. And when you can make—I call it catching your sales groove, where there’s one day that sales reps just, they wake up and it’s just a little bit easier than it was the day before. Right? And you don’t know what happened, but it goes when you stop pitching your solutions. You start having conversations about your solutions. You start caring more about what the client needs than you do about your life. Is your commission check, and oddly enough, that’s when your commission check goes through the roof. So I think the authenticity is we’re in such a fake world, man. You know it, you know, the Instagram—I mean, how many people do you know that on Instagram? They look like the perfect family. But you know for a fact they’re an absolute train wreck, you know, as a family or a person. And I think this goes to—I was reading a book recently called “The JOLT Effect.” You know, “The JOLT Effect,” the crew that did CEB, Corporate Executive Board that did “The Challenger Sale,” “Challenger Customer,” and now “The JOLT Effect.”

Mark Shriner [30:30]:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

John Barrows [30:31]:
So “The JOLT Effect” woke me up a little bit to—everybody says it’s indecision. I’m sorry. Everybody says it’s no decision, right? Well, it’s not. “No decision is our biggest competitor,” it’s indecision, because there’s just too many options now for people. And so our job is to kind of reduce the fear factor of making the transition. And you can really only do that when you’re authentic. Because what I’ve started to do, I’ve actually flipped over in a lot of ways and started talking about the negative of a decision, if they make the wrong one. Because everybody paints that perfect picture of what your life is going to look like if you invest in this tool or whatever it is. And oh my god, you’re gonna have so much—nobody believes that anymore. So when you can come in authentically and tell the client straight up, “Hey, here’s where we’re great. Okay. These other areas we’re okay. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, we don’t knock it out of the park. We have those things, but if you’re looking for what I got what we’re great at, then let’s go. But if you’re not,” and like you said, you mentioned this, “let me introduce you to somebody who is.”

Mark Shriner [31:30]:
Totally, you know. So I read and I’ve watched his videos, Jordan Belfort’s book and watched the videos, and I have a massive amount of respect for his interpersonal communication skills, his ability to train up sales teams in the context of his industry. Okay. If there’s one kind of shortcoming, I would say that it’s a little weak on authenticity. It’s more about kind of manipulating or kind of driving the conversation down the road that you want it to go down. And I kind of feel especially in—maybe that works in a B2C environment, but in a B2B environment, I don’t think you’re gonna really—because there’s too many stakeholders involved in anything like that. I think it’s always better just to say what you said, “Hey, this is what we’re good at. And this is what we’re not good at.” And some of my best wins have come when a customer or prospect says, “This is what we’re looking for.” And I said, “You know what, right now, we don’t have the best solution for you. But let me go back and talk to the team. And if they can come up with something that fits your needs, can I come back to you?” And of course, they say, “Yeah, come back, come back here.” But just admitting that I think buys you some kind of political will.

John Barrows [32:42]:
So much credibility.

Mark Shriner [32:43]:
And then when you know—and that whole kind of theme of authenticity, doesn’t it feel good when you deliver value, and you see you help a customer solve a problem? And like, you know, if you go in and train their sales team, for example, and that team goes on to be all rock stars. You go back over there, and it’s just like, they’re your best friends forever.

John Barrows [33:13]:
Yeah. And that’s why it’s the long game. And all due respect, I can’t stand Jordan Belfort. I can’t stand Grant Cardone. I think they’re the worst thing that could ever happen to sales, quite frankly. It’s everything that’s wrong about selling, literally. It’s trying to convince people of stuff they don’t give a shit. It’s just trying to get the commission check, right. And yeah, maybe they’ll benefit from it, but that’s not their driver, their driver is to move books and cash and drive my Lambo.

Mark Shriner [33:39]:
Grant Cardone, I mean, a pen. So—

John Barrows [33:42]:
Like, that’s why when people say, you know, “What are your favorite sales movies?” and everybody rattles off “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Wolf of Wall Street,” “Boiler Room.” Wrong. Those are the worst sales movies I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Don’t get me wrong, they’re good movies. They’re fun movies. And I recommend people watch them, but they are horrific sales movies because it is literally everything that is wrong about this profession and why we have the reputation that we do. If you want to watch some—

Mark Shriner [34:11]:
Yeah, what’s a great sales movie?

John Barrows [34:13]:
Yeah, my favorite sales movies, you got—there are two of them. There’s a lot of them. But my two favorite—you got to watch my second favorite one first, and then my first one, because the second one’s a little rough to watch. But it’s “Pursuit of Happyness.” Like, I mean, that guy—when I thought I worked hard, right? That guy was saving seven seconds of a phone call so that he could get home by 4:30, so get to the shelter by 4:30 so his kid could have a place to sleep. Like, that’s working hard.

Mark Shriner [34:43]:
That’s my son.

John Barrows [34:45]:
But the problem with that movie is like 95% of it is straight-up depressing. And it’s like at the end you’re like, “Oh my God. Finally, he did it. Great.” Right. So that’s why you have to watch my favorite sales movie after that, which is “Tommy Boy.” Chris Farley’s “Tommy Boy.” Hands down the best sales movie I’ve ever seen. It’s a dumb American movie, don’t get me wrong, Chris Farley is just—it’s total slapstick comedy, whatever. But it’s beautiful because it is the purest example of sales that I could imagine. So I’ll give a quick example. His dad’s like a master sales guy, he’s got all these things. And Tommy’s just this idiot son who’s seven years later still in college and just a drunkard and stoner and whatever. And he graduates college finally, and he comes to his dad’s business, and you see his dad’s just like, super awesome, whatever. And long story short, his dad dies. And now Tommy has to take over the business, if you will, and they’re gonna sell it to the bank because they can’t pay their bills, right? So Tommy has to go sell. And in the first part of the movie, he’s trying to be his dad. Like he’s trying to use his dad’s lines. He’s trying to use his dad’s pitch and those type of things. And he’s terrible at it. Like literally terrible at it. And then one day, no—and then one day, he kind of puts his sales down, and he goes—him and David Spade get in a fight. And they’re sitting down at a diner. And this woman comes over and he’s like, “I’ll take the wings.” And she’s like, “I’m sorry, kitchen’s closed.” He’s like, “Oh, that’s unfortunate.” And he’s like, “Helen.” He goes, “What’s your name?” Right? And he just forgets about sales for a second. He just immediately turns to her and he goes, “What’s your name?” She’s like, “Helen.” “Helen, you look like a Helen. Let me tell you why I suck as the salesman.” He says, “Some guy’s interested in my product, it seems like you’re remotely interested. Why you get all excited? I’m like Jojo, the Indian circus boy, pretty new pet,” right? And he’s like—and then he goes through this whole thing about how much of a train wreck he is, right? And the whole time the waitress is like, “What the?” And then she’s like, “You know what? Let me go fire up the grill. I’ll get you those wings,” right? And it’s like that moment that he was his authentic self. He wasn’t trying to pitch her on anything. He was telling a funny story. It was relatable. He was self-deprecating. And he didn’t care if the grill went back on because he had a pizza in the trunk if he had to, right? So that moment, I use the example of catching your sales groove. Because he was trying too hard before that, then it, then it caught. And then he took off. So it’s just a beautiful example of what I think sales should be about.

Mark Shriner [37:15]:
Thank you for those. And I haven’t watched “Tommy Boy,” but it’s on the list. And I’ll watch it real soon here. I would throw it in there. I don’t know if people would consider it a sales movie, but I think we can learn a lot from it, and that would be “Jerry Maguire.” Because, you know, he was playing this role of the super slick guy, you know, with the ladies and with his clients, but he was just empty inside, right? And he decided to get authentic. He took a huge risk. And in the end, finally, if you’ve watched the movie, can you believe it? It was like twenty-five years ago.

John Barrows [37:54]:
I know. Tell me about it.

Mark Shriner [37:56]:
You know, but it’s an amazing, inspiring story as well. So talk a little bit about, okay, what kind of topics do you touch on in your course? And how is the course structured? Is it one day, two days, a week? Talk a little bit about how—

John Barrows [38:08]:
I appreciate that. Yeah, so I got two programs, right. I try to cover the full spectrum. That said, I do not believe in methodologies. I don’t believe there’s a singular methodology out there that is good at everything. I think we’re all good at certain pieces, right? I think Miller Heiman is good for this, Sandler is good for that, SPIN, you name it. My approach is super tactical and structure-oriented. So I got two programs. One is called Filling the Funnel, which is all about getting meetings, right? So it’s refining your ICP, understanding your personas, coming up with a formula that I came up with for sales-ready messaging that you can put into emails, calls, and videos, and then showing how to do the research to find triggers, and then putting—showing them how to do email, call, video, and social to drive high-quality meetings with top-tier accounts. That’s probably seventy-five percent of what I do because nobody has an answer on the prospecting side. Everybody’s just trying different things out. And I come with an agile structure that you can use to try out different techniques and approaches. The other one is called Driving to Close. That’s about once you get the meeting, right? So now that I got the meeting, what do I do? And that’s negotiations, objection handling, meeting execution, and questioning skills. But it really stems off of the negotiation scorecard. We do this give-get scorecard to objectively measure the health of any opportunity anybody’s pipeline. And so those two programs, I used to deliver them—I hauled around this world on site. I was a weekend dad when my daughter was born, which kind of hurt. I’d say my least favorite award I’ve ever gotten is the Million Mile Club on United. So I’m actually not proud of that in any way, shape, or form. But yeah, they used—each one of those is a full-day program if we do them on site. But when COVID hit, we shifted remote. And so now we deliver them remotely. So each program is delivered in three two-hour remote sessions. So it’d be like a Tuesday, Tuesday, Thursday, Tuesday scenario where there’s homework assignments in between each one and live application and everything else. And then last but not least, I have a membership that has all this stuff, where I do live sessions every single month for anybody to join as part of the membership. And I do workshops, and all my on-demand content is in there as well.

Mark Shriner [40:16]:
So let me ask you, in general, and then ask a couple of specific questions. But in general, do your customers or prospects before, you know, before you engage with them, do they ask you, “Is there any way that we are going to measure? How can we measure the success of your program?”

John Barrows [40:34]:
Yes, they do. And I call bullshit every time. It’s the ROI conversation. Okay. I’m happy to get into the conversation, but nobody’s willing to actually put in the effort to actually do it. Right. So here’s the thing, here’s the easy way to call people out on this BS of ROI of your program. Don’t get me wrong, because there’s ROI to my program, but it’s so specific to each company. Me giving you a number is irrelevant. Because, you know, here’s an example. Somebody says, “John, let’s go to Filling the Funnel, right? Prospecting.” They’re like, “Well, what’s the ROI of your training?” Okay, well, what are your current conversion ratios on your emails to your tier-one accounts to an exact, to a specific persona? What’s that conversion ratio? “Oh, well, we don’t know that.” Okay. So on your cold call blitzes, when you hyper-focus on one persona and come up with a message, what is your overall conversion ratio and success rate on cold calling when it comes to that specific thing? Not just cold calling in general, but for a specific—”We’re not sure.” Okay, how about cadences? Which one of your cadences is the best performing cadence? And I go through example after example, example.

Mark Shriner [41:49]:
We just want the ROI number, man.

John Barrows [41:53]:
So what I tell them, I’ll say, “You know what, Mark, it’s so nuanced compared to what you do and what you’re doing. And if you don’t know a baseline, there’s no way I can give you an ROI number here. But if you want to throw thirty percent at the wall because your boss is asking you for it, feel free to throw thirty percent in there. I know you’re not going to follow up with it afterwards, but I’ll give you a number.

Mark Shriner [42:14]:
And most companies are really weak on tracking afterwards. But let me ask you maybe more specifically. I feel like we’re at this crossover junction where prospecting—is it a marketing job? Because so much of it is done digitally, right? And should it be a marketing job? And shouldn’t you have your salespeople just in meetings and closing deals or doing, you know, discovery calls and then, you know, and then it kind of just moving things forward? Because that’s what they’re really good at. Because, you know, you can’t just pick up the phone and call people anymore. Sending faxes, you know, that shows how old I am. But it’s like, it used to be that’s what we do. But like there’s do not call lists, there’s, you know, spam laws and so on. So it becomes really, really challenging. And then that’s what the marketing people are supposed to be good at. What are your thoughts on that? I’m sure you have thoughts on both sides.

John Barrows [43:11]:
Absolutely. I do think that in the tech, in the SaaS space, right, the SDR/BDR role, the ones that were the appointment setters, I actually think that is going to roll up—I don’t think, I’m watching it happen. Almost every client I work with is starting to move that under marketing and operations. Because especially because we’ve over-engineered it over the past ten years with these cadence tools, and all this other stuff. So really, these reps are just pushing buttons. But now with all the AI stuff and everything out there, I think that it’s gonna get really, really good really, really fast at looking at true intent data, mapping out all the different components of what you and your business and you personally are doing. And with SDRs and BDRs rolling up under marketing, they’re gonna be playing with those tools to find true intent and account-based marketing type stuff. And then those leads, quote-unquote, come in to affect a full-cycle sales rep. And I don’t think we’re going to be—I think we’re going to be in a position in the not-so-distant future where I’m going to be sitting in front of a dashboard. And instead of me thinking, “Who should I reach out to today?” it’s gonna be served to me like, “John, you need to call Mark. And actually, you need to call Mark and email him because his profile says that he actually likes the phone better than email. And here are three things that his company has just did. And here’s what his persona and some of the challenges in the industry are. And he actually just posted this. And so when you call him, by the way, here are two or three snippets of info that you can use to strike up a conversation. Go.” And then I’m going to make that call. It’s all going to be recorded. It’s all going to be transcribed and automatically ported into Salesforce or whatever CRM you use, and I’m going to be able to go off to my next one. That’s what I believe the thing is going to—the danger of that is that’s only going to be a very small fraction of our population. And so if you’re not figuring out AI right now—so prospecting, as much as I do think it’s gonna get automated, I still think it’s a skill that every single sales rep should know how to do and do well. Because I tell people, if you learn how to prospect, you’ll never go hungry. And it doesn’t have to be just the old-school cold calling prospect. It is about using these tools to find intent data to get closest to the people who are in your market, all that stuff. Because what happened is it saved me. I mean, last year, the company fell apart. Like, I had to go hardcore back into prospecting and fill this pipeline up. So if I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t be here right now.

Mark Shriner [45:35]:
You know, and prospecting can come in many shapes, sizes, and shapes. You know, it could be the calling, it could be the email, it could be LinkedIn stuff, it could be going to networking events. I always like asking customers, you know, especially after a deal has been done, and they’re like, “Hey, man, thank you so much for this, I really appreciate it, blah blah blah. By the way, I noticed that you used to work for this company, or that company. If I wanted to reach out, do you have any, you know?” But that’s prospecting too, right? I mean, it’s not asking for referrals, asking for a warm introduction. And those are all skills that I totally agree with you. It’s not just the skill, it’s just the awareness that it should always be kind of top of mind. Always be looking for those opportunities.

John Barrows [46:20]:
Real quick, let me chime in real quick. That’s what I’m afraid of right now is that you and I had the fortune, if you will, of being in the bullpen, learning. Like, yeah, we took an ass-kicking probably early in our careers, you know what I mean? It was not fun. And I went out to every event. And I did—I mean, I did 400 calls a week plus meetings, plus networking events. But all of that created such a solid foundation for me. So now, like, if times are tough, I’m like, cool, I know what to do, right? Whereas if you got into sales, especially tech sales after 2010, I’m sorry, it just hasn’t been that hard. Like when money was free, growth at all costs. Sales skills didn’t matter all that much. Now they matter. And there’s a whole generation of sales reps that are struggling right now because of that. And because of the remote world too. Whereas I used to be able to walk in your office, Mark, and look at body language and see what’s on the walls. And I could kind of hold my own a little bit, read your body language. Now, you could fake it till you make it in 30 minutes. Like, you could absolutely fake being interested in a conversation over Zoom. In a face-to-face, it’s hard to, if you’re really not interested, it’s really hard to fake that with your body language and everything else. And when I can see your entire what you’re doing fidgeting and all that stuff. So I’m worried that this generation doesn’t have the context to be successful in a hard market.

Mark Shriner [47:42]:
Yeah, no, and I agree with everything that you’re saying there. And I do love the fact that I can be in Croatia and have a call with you or have a customer call with somebody on the other side of the world. But I don’t think there is any real replacement to a face-to-face meeting. And I still am still a believer in just get the meeting, just get the meeting. And that’s when I’m doing international business, I always use the fact that, “Oh, by the way, I’ll be in your city this time.” And when you drop it in that way, it’s easier to get a meeting because if you’re there all the time, but if you say, “I’ll be planning,” or “our CEO is going to be visiting Tokyo next week, can we set up a meeting?” It’s a special occasion, kind of a one-off thing. So, but let’s go to the second part of your training, where you’re teaching more like I would call more traditional sales skills in terms of how to work the deal through from that initial kind of meeting through the close. I feel like a lot of that comes down to personal style and communication, you know, and style and communication is stuff that we accumulate through our lifetimes. And a lot of people are, I feel, kind of hesitant to say, if you call in and say, “You know what, you should communicate in this manner,” or “You should do things in that manner.” Do you ever get any pushback? Because you’re really talking about, when you’re talking about their communication style, you’re talking about their personality. And it can be hard for some people to recognize that they need to maybe make some adjustments.

John Barrows [49:17]:
Yeah, look, I think sales actually should be more of a science than an art, quite frankly, because I think the science leaves the foundation for the art form to be that much more effective—the structure, the process we put in place. So I think there needs to be some type of structure, some type of common language, so that we’re all reading off the same playbook, whatever it is, and then you look to it once that foundation is in place, that everybody’s on the same page with those, then you can start to look at the personality traits that might make some people better than others. But you don’t know what those are until you put a process in place, right. So I think, you know, that’s why this give-get scorecard for me, for instance, there’s no like slick and personality to it. It is objective. There are things that clients ask of you. Here are all the things that you ask for. We point-score them in a certain way. So say there are twenty things on the list. Twenty gives and twenty gets. You know, when somebody asks for five, I ask for five in return. Somebody else asks for ten, I ask for ten. In return, we score deals. So I gave away a one to five, and a six I got to afford, and a seven. That score, twelve to thirteen, tells me how healthy the deal is. And so I think that, you know, and I always say with junior reps, it’s like, this is a roadmap. When somebody asks for five, ask for five in return. You’ll figure it out along the way. You’ll figure out how to ask that question. Now I can coach you on how to ask that question, right? Because I know that’s a challenge for you. For senior reps, I’m not trying to teach them negotiation, you know. It’d be, I think it’s actually insulting for somebody like me to come in and say, “Hey, Mark, after thirty years, you’re doing it your way. Stop. Do it this way instead.” That’s ridiculous, right? So that’s not what this is. This is, you know, take what’s in your brain, put it down onto a spreadsheet like this, and then just use it as a mirror to your gut. You know, if your gut tells you a deal is in good shape, fine, score it out. See how that score measures up to how you feel about it. And if it does, keep going. If it doesn’t, just ask yourself some questions. So I do think—not necessarily a methodology is important, but I do think structure is massively important so we can create a baseline to build from and then go find what each individual rep’s nuanced challenges or strengths are.

Mark Shriner [51:17]:
Totally agree with you. Having a structure or processes important, and then having a common language in your organization so that you can, you can actually compare apples to apples when we’re talking about where we are with this customer here. Alright. You know, we kind of wrap things up here a little bit. We talked early on about social, specifically LinkedIn. We talked about the importance of the different tools. We talked about sales processes and continuing learning. There’s a lot there. If you wanted to go in and coach an organization and say, “Hey, you know what, these are the factors that are going to help your organization to be successful.” And you have to balance, you know, your social marketing stuff, the tools, all these AI tools that are going to deliver the prospect to you and tell you exactly what, who to contact, when to contact them, what to say, versus, you know, the overall sales process. Because, you know, you got to train them and all that. How would you prioritize? Would you prioritize all three? You know, in what order? How do you structure that?

John Barrows [52:30]:
Yeah, it’s, it’s, that’s a big question, right? So, you know, I think any process is better than no process, first of all, because if you don’t have a process, to your point, you can’t measure it, you can’t understand what’s working and what’s not. So you have to have something in place that you can measure. And then you can build from that. And then you find the gaps. So here’s an example. I used to tell my team all the time, like, “I need you to think more strategically. I need you to think more—” And they’d be like, “What do you mean? Like, I don’t know what I’m—” I’m not a strategic thinker, man. Like, let me demystify strategic thinking for you. Okay, all strategic thinking is about is outlining a process. I don’t care what the process is, outlining a process, and then letting it run, and then seeing where the weakest link is in that process. And then when you find that weakest link, pull that weakest link down, make some improvements, do some training, you know, improve, and then plug it back into the process and see how it runs. And if it made it better, then what’s the next one? And so that’s where—I don’t think there’s one over the other because it’s so independent, you know, it’s so specific to each company. But I think as long as you have a baseline and can answer the questions that I asked about your ROI, yes, we know that when we send emails out to this, it is this conversion ratio. But you have to really look at end to end because most people don’t. Quick example here. You know, obviously, sales training, “John, we need prospecting.” “Okay, well, why prospect?” “Well, because pipelines are empty, and our reps don’t know how to send emails.” “Well, you need to start showing some better emails.” “I’m like, okay, who cares about sending better emails? Why is that the problem?” “Well, because, you know, we just need to—they’re terrible at this, we need to get better response rates.” I’m like, “Okay, fair, I can teach your reps to write better emails. That’s easy. Let me back up a little bit here, though. What’s your response rate on your emails?” “Super low, we only get like a three percent meeting rate and, you know, five percent or ten percent response rate.” “Okay. Do you know what your deliverability rates are?” “Deliverability?” “So, like, forget about response rates for a second. Do you know how many of your emails are actually even getting through to the people that you’re sending them to?” “Well, I haven’t thought of that.” “Okay, let me just—I’m happy to do training for you. Can I make a suggestion though? We go find out what that number is because I can train your reps to write the best emails in the world. But if your deliverability rates are brutal, then it’s not gonna make a difference.” So when I say use that example, that was, you know, downhill. “Okay, our deliverability is fine.” “What about how many emails?” “Okay, we’re actually, you know, behind.” So we had to go even further back. So I think if you look at all the nuances of the sales process, and you just kind of put it together and document it a little bit as far as what happens at these stages, whatever, and then you then you just let it run with some type of consistency, and a focal point. And then once you figure out the weakest points, then you start to pull those down and prioritize those.

Mark Shriner [55:23]:
Yeah, no, that’s, that’s awesome. Hey. Could you just kind of wrap things up here by talking, maybe just touch base a little bit on JB Sales, and also your podcast, the Make It Happen Monday podcast? And you know, if people want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do all that?

John Barrows [55:44]:
I appreciate that. Yeah, so, you know, look, I’m out there learning like everybody else, right? I always say, I’m not a trainer, I’m a sales rep who happens to train. I’m out there getting my ass handed to me just like you are, you know what I mean? Making the cold calls, sending the emails, doing my own disco calls. And I just don’t believe that—if you were successful in sales, you know, five, six, seven, eight years ago in tech sales, I have a hard time listening to you. And you telling me how to—”Oh, I was only one of the first reps at Company X that went from zero to a billion. And look at my process.” It’s like, yeah, kind of anybody could have been on a rocket ship zero to a billion. And I quite frankly, I don’t think your sales approach was what made that happen. So if you’re not selling today, if you are not actively selling and seeing what’s happening in this marketplace, I got a hard time listening to you. And so for me, I’m out there selling every day. So I just try to translate that to some of the members and what I share out there on social and everything else. And the best way to get in touch is actually just the website. We’re revamping everything right now. But if you go to jbarrows.com, J-B-A-R-O-W-S dot com, you’ll see my Twitter handle, my Instagram, LinkedIn, all that stuff. And you’ll see all the stuff that I do. I put a ton of free content out there, my YouTube channel and everything else. So, you know, I’m just trying to level us all up. And for those who care to—people, I live between the worlds of what I call the give a shit factor and unconscious competence. Like, if you don’t—there’s nothing I can do to get you to care. You know what I mean? Like, if you don’t care, I’m not going to try to force you to, but once you do, man, I will give you everything I got. I’ll give you every tip, technique, template, whatever I can to get you to the point of unconscious competence, where you just don’t really need this stuff anymore because you just are you. And so that’s what I’m trying to do with the membership and the training as well because I train individuals, we have individual memberships, I train all the way up to corporations like Salesforce. But yeah, that’d be great. And then the Make It Happen Monday podcast, we do that every single week and have some really cool conversations on that about business, life, entrepreneurship, mental health, those types of things. I got a few cool guests coming up here too. I actually landed Guy Kawasaki to come on the podcast.

Mark Shriner [57:56]:
No kidding. Well, that sounds congratulations.

John Barrows [57:59]:
He was on a webinar that I was on, a small private webinar that I was attending and I took my swing. I was like, “Alright, hey, any chance you know?” But yeah, it’ll be good. I’m trying to have some fun conversations.

Mark Shriner [58:13]:
Awesome. Well, hey, John, I really enjoyed this conversation. I’m actually going to rewatch this podcast myself. Just for the learning lessons here. This has been really valuable to me, and I look forward to meeting you in person one day.

John Barrows [58:26]:
Absolutely. Once you come back stateside, man, let me know.

Mark Shriner [58:30]:
Thanks.

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