The human brain will try to predict what you are going to say... next. Stories happen to be unpredictable, and so your buyers will pay extra special attention. Mike Adams, author of "Seven Stories Every Salesperson Should Tell" has mastered the art of storytelling during the sales process to ensure you are remembered. In this episode we discuss the stories that get your foot in the door, establish credibility, overcome objections and some other things.
"The opposite of storytelling is assertion of facts ... nobody remembers and nobody pays attention" -Mike Adams
Mike Adams is an engineer who would have been a rock physicist if it wasn’t for an unexpected career move to sales over 25 years ago, selling software to oil and gas companies. In 2003, Mike and his family moved from Russia back home to Australia where he story-told his way into a sales role, selling telecoms networks. Since then Mike has used storytelling to move between industries and countries to sell more than a billion dollars of products and services.
Mike has managed revenue teams all over the world for Schlumberger, Siemens, Nokia, Halliburton, Spotless and Motorola. In 2014, he co-founded a sales consulting business, using a Story-Powered Sales program to teach revenue leaders and sales teams how to be authentic, ethical, confident and effective in their client interactions through storytelling.
In July 2018 Mike released his first book, ‘Seven Stories Every Salesperson Must Tell’, to international acclaim. It is available online in all formats at https://amzn.to/2zGytib
Mike Adams:
Okay. Okay.
Max Traylor:
Hello world. We're back. I'm continuing my tour of the Australian continent. Today. I've brought Mike Adams to the show and Mike is breaking his normal routine of drinking wine at 6:00 AM and he's brought a local beer. Mike, what have you brought for us?
Mike Adams:
Uh, this is a VB, which is the beer of Victoria where I live. I grew up in Tasmania. We have Fosters and we have Boags and Cascade there. But this is a good beer.
Max Traylor:
Perfect. Well thank you for uh, breaking the norm and bringing something local. I always enjoy learning about beer as much as I do how the heck we grow businesses. So tell us what you do for a living.
Mike Adams:
I teach sales team storytelling, which is one of the most fun jobs you can have actually.
Max Traylor:
And um, did you wake up doing that? Has it been a progressive career? Have you focused on this for quite a while? How'd you, how'd you land on this?
Mike Adams:
Good question. I did not wake up doing this whatsoever. I trained as an engineer, I'm an electrical mechanical engineer. I got the dream job out of college running electronic instruments in oil wells all over the world. So I lived in Communist China in the 1980s and then Malaysia and Indonesia and then worked throughout Europe. And I got a job in sales in 1996. Um, while I was told it was a good career move for me, career move means, um, the job that nobody else wants to do. If you work in, um, in big corporations, you'll figure out what the code is. You know, we've got this great career opportunity and um, but it meant going to Norway and I'd never been to Norway. So, um, so I said yes, although my wife was eight months pregnant at the time, so that was a small complicating factor.
Mike Adams:
We got three boys and they followed us around the world. I got into storytelling Max by accident, by really noticing certain types of stories in sales. Um, and I think probably the first time I really noticed that I was working in Russia and I told a story about our company in Russia. Schlumberger started in the 1920s and, um, two brothers, two French brothers, Schlumberger would be the correct pronunciation. They invented a technique for measuring the resistivity of, of fluids in oil wells so they could work out where the oil was. And that invention was good enough to make a $40 billion company. And, but they've, like all entrepreneurs, you know, in the 1920s, they didn't have any customers and nobody thought it was a very good idea except for the Russians. And so they started their business in the former Soviet Union, actually in Georgia, in southern Russian republics, but in the early thirties, Stalin nationalized them.
Mike Adams:
So he stole all their equipment and kicked them out of the country. And, and so, um, fast forward to the 1990s when Russia was opening up again, uh, for business to Western companies, Schlumberger had to figure out, you know, do we go back in? Wasn't a very good history, but, um, the CEO took the call and he said, well, I'm willing to willing to invest 200 million or I'm willing to lose that much. And they invested in two Russian oil companies, two of the newly privatized oil companies and doubled their production in 18 months. And, and that's the kind of the story I was telling when I was working in Russia. And, um, and when you start hearing your stories come back to you from other clients, you know, that like a story is doing work for you. And it was one of the early times.
Mike Adams:
I was in the early 2000's that I was telling that story, and after that I started to notice more and more who told stories and what types of stories they tell. And so I started to collect them and I, I've been very fortunate. I've managed to jump from industry to industry with my sales career. And that's a, it's a tough thing to do when you, when you land in a new industry. I moved from oil and gas software to selling telecommunications equipment, big ticket, multi hundred million dollar kit to telecoms companies. And then I moved again to selling facility services and then changed to industrial products. And when you do that and you don't know anything including like you don't even know the right language, but you have like six months to sell something or you lose your job. So that kind of focuses the mind like what do I really need to know to represent my company and to make a difference and learning.
Mike Adams:
the right stories was what I figured out. You know, most companies haven't really prepared these stories for salespeople. So that's what I figured out in 2014 I set out to see if I could teach that to as a consultant to other companies. And - I back up Max - I started teaching all kinds of classic sales training, questioning and listening skills and and all sorts of things. But what I realized was that the only thing that really made a difference, and the only thing that salespeople really wanted to hear about was storytelling. Salespeople are a special breed. You know, most salespeople have a pretty high ego because you need that to, um, to manage all the rejection in your life that you're gonna necessarily get in this job. So it's difficult to teach, teach them anything because they've already sold something successfully and they've usually, like me, made the assumption that they must have been them,
Mike Adams:
their fantastic skill that sold that thing in the past. It couldn't possibly be the fact that the buyer had to buy somewhere. So yeah, it's difficult to teach salespeople anything but, but storytelling, they love to hear stories about selling and they love to love to learn about storytelling. And the very best salespeople are all excellent storytellers, which I'm sure you would've have noticed already on your, on your podcasts. I certainly notice that when I go into companies, I seek out the storyteller. Usually it's the CEO or the founder of it, a good storyteller. Usually they don't stop, they just keep telling stories.
Max Traylor:
So one of the, one of the first things you said about how you discovered this was really interesting, you said that you started to hear the stories come back to you.
Mike Adams:
Correct.
Max Traylor:
You know, I've, I've said this for a long time, never in story form, but I always tell people you have to simplify what you're saying because the person you're talking to has to repeat it to others in the organization. It's a game. Um, uh, what is it, telephone tag, the game that you play as kids and you whisper something into someone's ear and 20 people later, it's completely changed. So what is it about stories do you think
Mike Adams:
that make them
Max Traylor:
easy to repeat, easy to retain, uh, when different members of the client organization are retelling them? Once you've finished your conversation?
Mike Adams:
Okay. I try to give you the short version of this Max. It's not very well understood. We have, uh, the biggest part of our brain, our neocortex, it takes up three quarters of the volume. It's about the size of two fists. If you hold them together. And it's also in two halves, just like that. And if you lay it flat, all the wrinkly bits flat, it's about the size of a dinner napkin and about two millimeters thick and what it's doing, very few people really understand this. What it's doing is continuous memory prediction, so it's memorizing patterns that repeat in your environment. So things that you see, hear, touch, feel inside your body, whatever it repeats as a pattern. It memorizes and predicts what's going to happen next. And your neocortex was predicting that I was going to say the word next and it was actually predicting what it would sound like when I said that.
Mike Adams:
You're also predicting how I might feel if you say something and trying to predict how this podcast's going and all that kind of stuff. You're just continuously predicting. The way neocortex cortex works is it focuses on what is difficult to predict. If it can easily predict something, it just automates that process and pushes it down into our subconscious. We don't pay attention anymore. So the reason that my wife says I don't listen very well, it's probably - and I think the same of her - is because if you have a standard conversation with your partner day in, day out, you become very predictable and you do stop listening. So the beautiful thing about stories is they are by definition they're sequences of related events. So we know it's a sequence. So we know something going to happen, but we also know that it's going to be unpredictable and that, and by convention stories are are unpredictable.
Mike Adams:
So as long as you start your story the right way with a time and a place and stuff, and make sure that it's a sequence of related events, people are going to listen because they don't know what's going to happen next. And that's the true power of stories, they are sequences and we remember them highly remember that's how our brain works. It works by remembering sequences and they're unpredictable. And in business context, if you can't put it in a story, you probably isn't going to be remembered at all. The opposite of storytelling is asserting. When you assert facts, when you say this fact, this fact, this fact not in a sequence, it's really hard to remember and people don't remember and they don't pay attention. So there you go.
Max Traylor:
That's um, that's brilliant. I'm doing some new videos for my website. I'm shooting them on Monday and now I have to rethink or, or emphasize the stories more. I do always start with stories. My, you know, my career currently comes from life experiences. So it just tends to be, but I've never understood it and that what a brilliant answer
Mike Adams:
I'm an engineer. I'm an engineer that is also interested in artificial intelligence and neuroscience. And I never, I never felt good about the stock answer. And the stock answer is, you know, stories have emotion and it's about the middle and the emotional brain. There is only, we only have an emotional brain, we don't have a rational one. It's all emotion. But, but the neocortex synthesizes all of your senses and the best way to think about emotions is your internal body sense. So it's one of your senses, like your sense of vision is your interoception, your, your internal body sense, the feeling of how fast your heart moves, your guts. Um, and you know, just think of all of that internal body sense as a sense, like vision or touch or smell. And that's the best way to think of. And the neocortex doesn't care. It doesn't care if it's trying to predict what you're going to see next or you're going to hear next or how you're going to feel. It just predicts that. And that's really what stories tap into.
Max Traylor:
So, you know, my, uh, my questions started with, uh, the observation that it's important for people to be able to remember what you say and, and repeat it so that the message can reverberate throughout the organization. But what other challenges have you found storytelling to be a perfect solution for in the sales process? And most of the listeners understand the challenges of sales, they don't make their number for a number of reasons.
Mike Adams:
Well, you know, I consider this a really good question and my book which you see over my shoulder, Seven Stories is written around the three basic challenges of sales and the challenges come in sequence. The first sequence is connection. How do I connect with a buyer, a potential customer so that they will know me, like me, trust me and treat me as an authority so that they can tell me about their situation and I can hope to diagnose and understand. So that's the first problem is how do I connect and stories are brilliant tools for that. But particularly your personal story, you tell your personal stories so that you can say something like, enough about me. Max, what about you? How did you get into podcasting and doing this crazy stuff with beer? You know, I want to know how that happened. And then you exchange stories.
Mike Adams:
And the exchange of stories is, is the start of rapport. In fact, I think exchanging stories is the start of friendship. If you think about your friends, you know their story and they know your story, it's almost a definition of friendship. And if you start your business engagement by exchanging stories, you're off to a great start. You're, you are way ahead of how most people run a business meeting. So that's the first thing is connecting. The second problem that you have in sales is how do you change the mind of your buyer? Because your buyer is going in a direction that doesn't include you normally. They're not ringing you up and ordering lots of your stuff, right? They've got their own idea and you've got to change their mind. And really, okay, there's two ways to change the mind of a buyer.
Mike Adams:
One is to tell them the story about another client that you had that succeeded in some way that they could be like, and we call that a success story. So we use a success story to change their mind and give them an experience because stories give you an experience. There's only two ways to get experienced Max. You can either go and do it yourself or you can listen to somebody else's story of them doing it. There's only two ways you can actually learn something, right? And so your future client can learn from the experience of your other clients by hearing your success story. But to do that, you've got to put the story the right way. You've got to start the story with your successful client and you have to make them that successful client, the hero of that story. And most vendors get it the wrong way around.
Mike Adams:
They want to make themselves the hero of their success story. It's not your success story, it's your client's success story and you're just the guide, you are just to help her along the way. And the other mind changing story Max is the insight story. That's the story about how you learned something or your company learned something about your market that your buyer doesn't understand. So by definition, insight is something your buyer doesn't understand. So if you turn up and say, Mr buyer, you don't understand this thing, it's going to come across as arrogance, you know, and there's a whole genre of selling called Challenger and challenge selling. A lot of people think that they should just challenge their client but it doesn't go that well for them typically because you know, particularly your 26 year old sales guy trying to challenge the 50 year old buyer is um, is a real challenge.
Mike Adams:
You know, that often doesn't work well. But if you take the approach that I need to teach the insight by telling the story of how we learnt that thing, how did we discover that inside? If you tell that as a narrative, what you're doing is taking your buyer from not understanding to learning and understanding the same way you did, how you actually learnt that thing. So those are the two stories that really change minds. They differentiate your business and they change minds. And the last problem, the third problem that sales people have is how do I close the deal? How do I actually get them to commit? And this is about understanding risk. Buyers don't buy or they stall or they've failed to change because they're worried about what can go wrong. And there's a couple of stories you can tell, but the most important one is value stories. What is your company going to behave like after you buy? Are you ethical, honest, if things go wrong, because things always do go wrong. How do you behave? And if you can tell stories that provide comfort on the risk, you can help get the deal over the line. And that's a story that helps you close. So those are the three problems and, and stories work their way through the entire buying cycle, sales and buying cycle. I hope that answered the question.
Max Traylor:
Yeah. Uh, you know, we're in trouble here, Mike, because I can listen to you talk all day and uh, I'm looking at your books, Seven Stories, every sales person and now I have to read another book. So thank you very much. Um, but you know, look, you've obviously got, you know, this, this brilliant knowledge that can help salespeople. And I'm curious about the business model and you know, we were talking about this earlier and you know, you said, yeah, that something that's not talked about enough is really how people use their knowledge to make money. And a lot of marketing and salespeople are suffering because they take their knowledge and somehow turn it into a commoditized service. I'm going to use my, a lifetime of experience in this industry, but I'm gonna write some content. Anybody can do that. And um, so I know that you've packaged up your knowledge very well and I'm curious about your relationship with revenue. How are you contributing to the world in a way that you can wind business down if you want to, you can spend more time with family, you can hang out with friends and share a beer, uh, and you're not working 90 hours a week.
Mike Adams:
Yeah, that's, that's a really good question. And I would like to say I've struggled with it. It's kind of true and false. I don't have to work Max because I've been a successful salesperson and, and um, and actually I think you should be suspicious of any sales consultant hasn't made a lot of money selling because, um, you know, that's the kind of the proof. Right? But, um, but, but I did struggle because I do what I do because I love doing it and you know, I want to keep working. Uh, but I did struggle to work out how to differentiate myself and how to really make a difference with my clients. So 2014, I stopped working for big corporations. I worked for big corporations in lots of different industries, had a successful selling career and, but I wanted to see if I could work with sales teams.
Mike Adams:
And I tried a lot of things. I like to experiment and I experimented on my clients. They don't mind me saying that because, you know, they've all stayed. My clients, I'm kind of the sales manager for Buick, my early clients. I hang in there with them. Um, but I experimented with all sorts of things and what I discovered Max, it's not probably not a big surprise, but it's very hard to teach salespeople anything. It is, it's really tough because most salespeople, the big middle group have had some success. And what happens to humans is as soon as you've had some success, you make the logical connection that you must be skillful. I did that myself. I was unbelievably lucky in my first year as a salesperson in Norway. I landed the biggest deal worldwide in our company selling a new software product. And it was just complete luck like the client did all the work, I just got in the way of the biggest deal by luck.
Mike Adams:
And if you, and if you can't separate what is really your skill and if you can't get aware about where you do well and where you don't do so well, it's really hard to improve. And it's really hard for a consultant to come in and work with the sales team and help them improve. But what I discovered with a bit of trial and error is that what worked for me, which was storytelling is very interesting to salespeople. They love to hear about storytelling and they get it. They get that it is something that they're probably doing already, but they're not doing it in a very focused, considered way. And so, so I worked out that storytelling was the thing I had to teach. It's like almost the only thing you can teach salespeople successfully, long-term, successful because I work long term with my clients. So, so I worked that out and then I wrote the book and the book's done very well and very happy for that.
Mike Adams:
Um, and now I've changed my business from really going deep with specific companies, long-term consulting to um, to doing something which is, uh, working with more companies over less time. So I've had to figure out the outcome because the outcome is if I've worked long-term with the team, I can do something. Like I can say, okay, if I can increase your sales by 20% in the next year and you can see how I do that, I want to take a share of it. You know I was doing like a revenue split, not with all clients but with some, and the problem with that is you need to go on there and work flat out with a year to actually make it happen. Now if I work short term with a client where I might do two or three days of workshops with teams, I need to figure out the enduring value.
Mike Adams:
How do I give them something that they can measure the output and see they're getting something. Now they get some enduring value from the stories because they remember the stories. But the thing that I focus on, Max is getting them to build a story library. So getting them to create reusable content for their sales operations and almost no company has a story library. I haven't come across one yet that's really institutionalized that, but I might be wrong, but it's very few. So that's the first thing. And the second thing I do is coach a leader, a person to be the story leader in their company. So someone who over three or four months I can teach them how to coach, how to facilitate storytelling and how to get storytelling as a practice in their organization so that it's done all the time routinely. And that works pretty well.
Mike Adams:
That means that I can, I can jump more from company to company, help more companies and some bigger companies and still leave them with something that really works for them, which is the story library and the ongoing practice of storytelling. So in terms of specific business model, um, well I'll give you my sales process first. So my sales process is figuring out which companies I want to work with. And that's some companies I worked with in the past where I would like to go and reconnect with some old friends or some other companies that interests me. I want to work with companies that I can, that I can really make a difference with. And I research companies that way. So I work out who I want to work with. And then, um, and then I kind of do a multi approach up and down solve, send my book to the CEO and that sometimes works.
Mike Adams:
But CEO's, you know, they're pretty busy and they often don't read the book that you send them. So or I'll send my audio book to them, but I also work with people, sales leaders and I've worked with them and I'll send them the book and sort of get them to influence the CEO from the other direction. And this can take a little time, it can take a few months, but usually by the time someone actually reads the book or gets part way into it, they get it. And then that's how I can start engaging in. And usually I engage with a workshop, either a full day on storytelling for rapport, how do we tell personal stories and how do we get rapport going or a full day on storytelling for deal making. How do we build our success stories, our values, stories and our insights stories. And then take the, take one person under my wing in that company and coach them to build the story library and keep them, keep them going. And that's working pretty well.
Max Traylor:
Do you with, with your understanding of how to sell this and your understanding of how to impact sales using storytelling and the way you've packaged these workshops, do you feel like it's necessary for you to be the only one
Mike Adams:
doing this?
Max Traylor:
or are there other people out there that you can
Mike Adams:
No, I have a couple of partners and I've just started on this Max. Um, so um, it's definitely a business that could scale, I built some online. I've built some online packages. And one of the things when you do a one day workshop your head's swimming with stories but you, you usually don't have the skill yet to tell a succinct story. So I, I have some online program out which, which is self paced, but within that is video and message practice. So we actually use video message to practice the stories. There's a really good way actually. So I get people to send me a little two, three minute stories by video and I coach them that way and it's quite time efficient. But better than that, when someone practices a story on video, they listen to themselves telling the story and they can see how long it takes because the video message tells you how long it takes. And also I'm like, I want it two minutes. So then I go, that's four minutes. So they have another go and they keep practicing and it's a really nice way to get the practice going is through video message. Um, so where was I going? So I have basically developed collateral that other people could take up and I'm just at the point of thinking about what it would take to certify other people to, to deliver the course. So I think that would be quite a bit of fun. But I haven't done it yet.
Max Traylor:
Well, it, it occurs to me that what I like when you started talking about training the sales manager on how to coach their team, uh, in storytelling. And what I find is as soon as people start training the trainer, and it's usually at the client organization, when I talk to sales consultants, that is the same exact collateral redirected. And the only thing you have to add is the sales content, how to sell it and how to charge for it, the business model and convince them that this is a business model that they should focus on versus the professional services they provide today. But what it, what it can do for you. And this is especially important for people that want to slow down, that want to contribute to more people but literally don't want to work anymore. Not because they're lazy, but because you know, some personal priorities have started to take over.
Max Traylor:
Um, it's this laziness. Yeah, fine. Well, you know, I like to play golf, so you know, that's me and I traveled the world playing paint ball, which is another story. But, um, but the point is that this knowledge can turn into an annuity stream. And you know, there are so many examples in different industries. EOS I think is the best example of the business model of the perfect business model. You charge for certification, you charge a subscription for the ongoing coaching that you described, send in some things, have you, you know, do, do some things from afar. Um, but the final piece is that you might get to focus on your personal brand on that book of yours, that's so powerful and when you generate opportunities, handing those off to your professional implementers allows you to command some revenue share of your desire, some undisclosed number. And what I find is not many people have a problem with that or say no to that because you're handing them business. Not only, you know, not only a business model, um, you're giving them the business. So that's, that's the ultimate Trifecta I've found for people looking for a passive income stream that want to continue to contribute to the world. But really all they want to do is maybe write their next book on a beach somewhere.
Mike Adams:
Yeah. And I think that I'm on that train. I just haven't, I'm just at that point, Max. So, because I'm, because I'm an engineer and I have to figure things out like exactly how they work. So my progression has been figure it out for myself. Get into some companies and work very closely long term with a few companies to find out what works and what doesn't work and then package it as something that I can sell myself. And I have a couple of partners at the moment that can do it. And now I'm just at that point. And my primary concern Max actually is quality. It's quality of delivery. Like I want to make sure that if I do that, that it's done, it's done right. And it's, that's, that's the point that I'm at, to make sure that it's done right. I mean, the people that would purchase this from me will get an enjoyable experience. They'll get it, they'll build a good business out of it. You know, it's not just, I'm pretty considered in that process. I want to make sure all the pieces are there to make them to go go. That's exactly what I'm thinking about.
Max Traylor:
Yeah, I think it, well, you know, it's a beautiful, uh, mindset that you have and that's what I'm trying to contribute, uh, to people on this show. It doesn't matter where you are in that journey, but having the ultimate goal of putting your priorities and your personal relationships first, um, that mindset is really the only path to achieve s,aid freedom, is a way to separate your personal time and effort from money, uh, so that you can make more, i.e. contribute to more people without having to increase the amount of effort you put in because that's a zero sum game. Eventually you have to, eventually you run out of effort to contribute and if the money dries up, you better have thought of that magic word retirement a long time ago and not live in a country like mine where the concept is disappearing every day.
Mike Adams:
Yeah, that's right. That's right. Um,
Max Traylor:
well, I'll tell you what, you know, from the people I talk to, I know that this is a sales thing, but it's a very, like I talked to a lot of sales and marketing consultants, and this seems like one of those things that sits right in the middle.
Mike Adams:
It absolutely is. And you know, when I run those workshops, I always want marketing in them. I don't want to run sales only because what I discovered, Max, is that sales leaders are no good at systems marketing. People are good at systems. Salespeople are good at getting out and talking and implementing and getting deals done, but they're not good at systems thinking. So, and story library is systems thinking and coaching a leader is systems thinking, right? That's the engineering. Me and marketing is the best address for that. But the problem in most organizations is the marketing often doesn't have good credibility with the sales. So you've got to get them all to,
Max Traylor:
I was gonna, I was gonna say, do they sit in the back in the dark during his work? Silently observed,
Mike Adams:
but I get deeply involved because they realize that, that they're hearing true stories from the troops. You know, when they hear those stories from the sales guys, it changes the way they think about their marketing collateral. So the whole thing works better with marketing and sales. So storytelling should be thought of as per revenue, should be thought of as a marketing and sales initiative. Definitely both. Yeah.
Max Traylor:
Well I just think of that because I think the opportunity would be, I mean, first off to seek out and certify the aspirational, uh, sales coaches of the next generation and give them something simple. And as you put it, something, one of the only things that sales people can actually remember, uh, correct, which by the way tackles the number one challenge of buyers purchasing, sales coaching, that people don't remember it even if they repeat it over. Um, but also there's, I think there's an opportunity, um, to look at the marketing space, especially the growing freelance marketing space. Uh, and an opportunity to say, look, you guys want to make a big impact on marketing and you know, you can't do it without making an impact on sales. So here's something that can bridge the gap. This could be a marketer's ticket into the sales conversation and not in a way that, you know, I'm going to teach you how to sell because no marketer has the credibility to do that. But you can make the argument that stories and the documentation of those stories in the library as you call it, should fall under marketing's domain and it's sales' responsibility to understand how to wield those weapons.
Mike Adams:
That's right. And sales are the source of those stories that the very best salespeople have. Brilliant stories. So you just got to, that's half the battle with the workshop is getting those stories out. Right. And then, but marketing is, is the best address for owning the library, that's been my experience so far with almost every company. Well,
Max Traylor:
I keep talking to people and sometimes I find brilliant minds and I've found one today. So let me know where to make out the check. Uh, I've got another, you know, I've got a whole other education on my hands right here. Unfortunately I have to redo all my material, but at least people will remember what I'm saying. Right. Um, but uh, one last question. If you could go back three years in time and give yourself one piece of advice,
Mike Adams:
what would it be? Only three years. So when I started my company, yeah. Um, I was way, way, way too broad in my offering. So the, the, non-intuitive thing is to pick highly impactful area of business and become the master of that thing and be the name in that place, in that marketing place, all the business, all the business diverts to the name and the place, the person who is the expert in that thing, everyone else is, is scrambling for crumbs. So you absolutely have to be that by place. The place could be the geography, your area where you work or it could be the particular area of business. So I chose sales storytelling to be the name in. And that is the absolute key to being able to charge what you're worth and to be also listened to it very hard to even be listened to in as a consultant if you're not the name. So that is, I put it out, I'll send you a link to a short video that I put on this about the Pareto effect and about, it's actually called why you shouldn't take advice from Richard Branson, but it's all about the name and the place. And uh, this is the thing that consultants and anyone starting business has to get their head around or you really struggle.
Max Traylor:
What was that called? It was a principle that you just mentioned and I love that video by the way.
Mike Adams:
It's called the Pareto principle. The Pareto principle says that in a productive system, 80%, the output will come from 20% of the resources in the system. So if you have a team of a hundred people, 20 of those people will produce 80% of the productive outputs. And if you look in those 20 people, 20% of them, meaning four will produce 80% of their outputs. So it's, it's a very nonlinear curve and the easiest way to understand it is the game of monopoly. I don't know if you've ever played monopoly, but in monopoly, every, every player starts with an equal amount of cash and an equal position on the board and as you play one person gets more and more and more, that person becomes the only productive agent of the game until they win the game. That process of everyone being equal and one person getting more and more and more is a natural phenomenon.
Mike Adams:
It occurs in nature in all kinds of social groups. It occurs in ecology and you have to get your head around it. Most people are good at understanding bell curves and I think that someone who's really successful is out at the end of the bell curve on talent, but it's not true. There may have just had a slightly little bit better luck at a certain point and then to them accrues all the advantages and they get more and more, they become more and more than name in that place. Right? So this peritoneal effect is really important to understand in business. It's crucial that you understand that.
Max Traylor:
And what you're saying is that by, by focusing, by, uh, being less broad and more focused on a single business challenge or a unique solution to a business challenge like storytelling, you're able to be that person on the monopoly board that ultimately gets all the money.
Mike Adams:
That's it. You get all the money and, and you can, that's exactly it. And you can choose which way you want to cut it. You know, do you want to be like the expert in your town or your suburb or do you want to be the expert in that particular industry, that particular thing? Or do you want to be the industry expert in that technique? That cuts across the industry. So you just choose how narrow, but you've got to start very narrow. And it's counter-intuitive because it means you have to turn down work that doesn't fit that early on. So that's, it's, it's difficult. It's a difficult thing to pull off, but it's really important to have in mind.
Max Traylor:
All right, fine. You get the fish's on the hook. I, I give up. What, how did, when you were making this decision, did you look at other people that were trying to make a name for themselves in sales storytelling and make a determination that you've gone narrow enough because you felt that you could beat the people that were currently there? Or was it more of a personal choice because you felt that was the right thing to do and that's what you were passionate about?
Mike Adams:
It's actually the second one. Um, I just found that it worked. It was one of the few things that really worked, Max, but when I, it's serendipity, it's good luck. When I look at, you know, who's teaching sales storytelling? It's very, very few. You know, it is a really under acknowledged part of business, let alone sales. And it's so important for sales. Once you start noticing the excellent salespeople in the stories they tell you won't think about selling any other way after you notice that. It's just, it's just one of those things that tends to be a bit invisible in conversations. People just enjoy the story and don't notice that the story is doing all this work. This is really doing a lot of work
Max Traylor:
well because their brain is trying to predict what's happened next. They're not thinking about, oh, this person's telling a story. It's a true magician's trick. You've got their brain trying to predict what's going to happen next and they just don't notice what's going on. They don't understand the intent of the story. It's not all it is. It is a, it's exactly what magicians do. They, they create, um, have a look over here and I'm doing this thing here, right? Visual distractions to hide. You know, what's going on. Well, this is brilliant stuff, Mike. Thank you so much. Uh, for those of you listing all the, all the normal, cheeky things I normally say, my brain is still trying to predict what's going to happen next. So that's all I got. Drive safe, see you next time.
Mike Adams:
Max, if I, I would like to tell a little bonus story about drinking, which you can put on separately if you'd like.
Max Traylor:
All right, I'm gonna. I'm going to stop the recording now and we'll get a, we'll get a special encore recording of your drinking story here for a, for LinkedIn purposes only professionals
Mike Adams:
See you next time.