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Welcome to the Sales Lead Dog podcast hosted by CRM technology and sales process expert Christopher Smith.
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Talking with sales leaders that have separated themselves from the rest of the pack.
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Listen to find out how the best of the best achieved success with their team and CRM technology.
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And remember, unless you were the lead dog, the view never changes.
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Welcome to sales lead dog.
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On today’s episode, I have joining me Evan Dumichelle of Northstar Strategies.
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Alvin.
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Excuse me, Evan, welcome to sales lead dog.
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Hi.
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Thanks for having me.
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Appreciate it.
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Yeah, sorry about that little flub on your name.
0:45
Evan, tell me about Northstar Strategies.
0:48
Thanks for asking.
0:50
So I’m Evan, I’m the founder of Northstar Strategies.
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And after 15 plus years in managed services, including most recently as the VP of operations at a 70 person MSPI, saw this critical gap in the market where organizations are losing thousands of dollars to misaligned technology partnerships because they’re stuck between a technical team over here that wants to talk tech with them and business executives over here that don’t understand the tech.
1:15
And there’s rarely a bridge in the middle communicating that value.
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And the technical consultants, God bless their hearts, have never run an operation.
1:26
And so a lot of people will advise them to talk about the business value, but quite frankly, they don’t understand the business value and that’s not their fault.
1:35
So what I’ve done is I’ve started a consultancy that bridges the gap between technical and executive speak.
1:41
And everything I do is all about communicating business value, risk mitigation and getting actual results to business executives in hopefully a more pleasant and productive relationship than often is experienced with their managed service provider partners.
1:58
And my goal is not to displace managed service providers, it’s to support them in an area where their contract say they’re focusing on things like cybersecurity compliance, continuous compliance, things like that, and empowering them to actually achieve those goals.
2:12
That’s awesome.
2:15
So the brand new company, what?
2:18
Tell me that that moment when you decided I need to go do this.
2:22
Tell me about that.
2:24
It was a long time ago, if I’m being honest.
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So the moment that I decided I needed to do it didn’t happen or I didn’t result in me doing it until about, oh, I don’t know, five years later.
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And the moment was when I thought I knew everything in technical world.
2:46
I’ve been doing it forever.
2:48
And a client came to me and said, hey, can you help us get CMMC compliant?
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For the, for those of you watching who don’t know what that is, it’s a government subcontractors are required in the very near future to achieve cybersecurity maturity model compliance to secure controlled unclassified information.
3:08
It’s jargon soup.
3:10
And it was jargon soup to me too.
3:11
That was the whole point.
3:12
And so my knee jerk reaction was, Oh yeah, absolutely.
3:16
And then the panic set in because it wasn’t something that I understood, knew anything about, had heard of, and I needed to go research it.
3:25
And when I researched it, I saw an opportunity and I wanted to proselytize it to the wider technical community.
3:33
And the adoption has been slow and working within managed service providers, what I felt and what I saw.
3:43
And again, I love MANA service provider world.
3:45
I worked in it for a long time, but it’s thin margins and a lot of people trying to be everything to everybody and clients expecting ACTO experience and getting less than that often times.
4:00
And, and so I felt it and I felt it again, and I tried to fix it internally a lot.
4:06
And ultimately when the opportunity presented itself to do it on my own, I thought I should give that a try because I can tell everybody everywhere about how I feel about it.
4:17
But put your money where your mouth is, man.
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Like if you feel like you can do it, then go do it.
4:21
And so that was it.
4:23
There you go.
4:24
When you look back over your career, I mean, you’re able to get to VP of operations pretty young age.
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What are the three things that really are behind your success?
4:36
You know, I had some notes written down, but then the first thing that occurred to me was a certain sense of stoicism and grit.
4:46
I think particularly as young individuals working in small businesses, you will see disruption.
4:55
You will small businesses experience disruption.
4:58
And when you’re going through that, you can see that as an opportunity or a reason to jump ship.
5:05
And I will say, look, there are some places where you should jump ship.
5:08
But if you find that the mission, the vision, and the values of the organization are aligned with you and you’re called upon to effect some change and you haven’t done it before, take the opportunity to try to give it a whirl, you know?
5:21
And so that was huge for me.
5:23
I just gave this advice to somebody else recently, and I am grateful for the tumult in my young working life because it allowed me to rise quickly.
5:34
And then once I was there to execute skills that I was learning on the fly and getting more comfortable with them and the pressure and stress associated with leadership at an age where I think I needed to tamp down my anxiety associated with it.
5:50
That’s one major.
5:52
Two more, two more.
5:56
Being technical is not as important as being able to communicate complex things in a simple way.
6:06
Someone used to say to me, I don’t know what I said until I know what you heard.
6:12
And so you know, you and I were chatting earlier about.
6:15
It is incredibly important to communicate your message up and down and sideways in an organization.
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And I think it’s really easy to forget that.
6:26
And it’s also true in a sales perspective or with a client.
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People don’t have the attention span or the time or the interest in becoming an expert at what you care a lot about.
6:36
What they want is to solve their issue.
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And that is inside, outside with your friends, with your family, with your wife, with your children.
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It’s it’s everybody, in my opinion, in my world view.
6:46
And so I’ve tried to adopt that as much as I can.
6:51
OK, last one, two ears, one mouth.
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Try to listen more than you can speak, especially as a leader.
6:58
I think this goes along a little bit with another one I wanted to mention, which is thinking you’ve got all the answers because I come from a technical background.
7:07
It’s really common for people with a technical background to want to have all the answers.
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It’s what they’ve been validated for doing their whole life.
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And so because that comes with the carrot of life, you want to be that way when you move into a leadership position.
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And it is really challenging and a lesson I wish I had learned earlier on that I don’t have to have all the answers.
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In fact, if I can surround myself with people who have answers that are better than mine and I can understand how to ask the right questions, then all of us will be more successful.
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I’ll become a force multiplier instead of an individual contributor.
7:43
Yeah.
7:43
When you were graduating high school, what was your vision for future Evan?
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Oh, my.
7:53
I wanted to be a film maker.
7:55
No, no kidding.
7:56
Yeah, yeah.
7:57
Future Evan wanted to be a film maker.
7:59
I actually did that do that for quite a long time.
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I’ve made three feature films and I.
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And when I say made, I mean I perform in them and I produce them and I say it in this context because it it is relevant.
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A movie is a small business.
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And so I was making these movies when I was just a help desk employee at a managed service provider.
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And I didn’t realize that I was forcing myself to learn skills that would then benefit me in my in my bread and butter career later on.
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I don’t know what you were doing when you were in high school playing guitar, what have you, but you know, wanted to be in a band.
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Maybe it’s it’s about the people around you.
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It’s about whether everybody else on the team can gain the trust that you’re all going to do it together.
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And it is, I mean, it’s the highest high you’re ever going to get when when a small group of people get a big thing done that, you know, a lot of other people aren’t getting done and you do it because everybody stayed up late and worked on it together.
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It’s intoxicating.
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And so that that was the thing that I wanted to do, did it and and it and it LED into these kind of things.
9:07
Yeah, that’s pretty wild.
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So you’re, you’re working help desk, doing your thing, making some money.
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How did you end up on this journey into selling?
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Yeah, well, like I said, small businesses and lots of change happening.
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So I was without getting too deep in the weeds, I was in help desk and I I had a a mentor, Randall Kender.
9:34
Shout out to Randall.
9:36
Who?
9:36
Who I think he wouldn’t mind me saying was a really prickly fella.
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And so my my intro was selling myself to Randall to let me sit on his shoulder and watch what he was doing and and really build relationship with him.
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And we became good friends over the years.
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And that takes some guts to go up to someone who you consider to be prickly to say, hey, I know shadow you.
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I know I was the newbie.
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I already had nothing to lose.
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I mean, I got the job because I was waiting tables and I saw a bunch of guys from a technology company sitting there.
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I was serving them drinks.
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I heard them talking about tech and I was like, I do that.
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And I didn’t do much of that.
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But then, you know, I think the CEO saw right through me, but he was like that guy’s ballsy.
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All right, come on in, we’ll interview you.
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I’ll give you like the lowest rung job you got because I see that you actually just want, you’re hungry.
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And so I wanted to find expertise technically and I became a network engineer and that helped me feel more confident in my role.
10:40
Moving through that, I switched to a different managed service provider and Kevin Klein, he was the owner of 3/18.
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He saw something in me that I didn’t see in me, which was the, the people interaction thing.
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And so I became the help desk manager there.
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And then you’re just like fielding challenging questions all day inside, outside, everything.
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And you’re never allowed to be flustered.
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Or in my opinion, if you’re good at your job, you should not convey that you are flustered.
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And then that quickly transitioned through changing in staff to becoming a client success manager.
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And that’s where sales comes in.
11:21
Because I came from that technical background, I was shifted into a client success manager role.
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And I didn’t know that I was getting into sales.
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I, I just was having these conversations with clients.
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I knew our product portfolio.
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I was told that I needed to go demonstrate value.
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And most of the time my safe space was, oh, here’s how this cool thing works and here’s what it does.
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And at that time in my career, I didn’t then know like the next step in communicating the value.
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But I was getting started in sales and I was, and I was doing a thing that I would advise others to do now, which is to know your product inside.
11:56
Now, you don’t have to be like, you know, the expert on the technical thing, but you should know the tool, the product, the service backwards and forwards.
12:03
And so, yeah, from there it shifted from client success manager to general manager of the organization.
12:08
Then in at, at that size, it wasn’t selling products, it was selling us.
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And quite frankly, it was telling me, which was what I did with Randall all those years ago.
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So, you know, it kind of comes full circle from there.
12:23
Yeah, I, I can keep going, but that was how it all got started.
12:25
No, that’s great.
12:27
I, I’ve been thinking back for me the early days, especially when you’re lower level, even when you get up to higher levels in organization, a lot of times it’s hard to know what the heck is going on and what is our path.
12:40
You may hear bits and you know, drips and drabbles here and there.
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But I personally think as a, as a leader, one of your roles is to create alignment within the organization.
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How do you do that as a leader?
12:55
Thanks for asking, I feel the same way.
12:57
I feel like creating alignment is one of the most straightforward things you can think you need to do.
13:05
That becomes incredibly complex and the way that I do it is first trying to make sure that I understand the why.
13:16
If I can communicate the why behind a change and that why is not my why, it’s the why for the department or the group or the person that I’m talking to and really block out the time to get individual time.
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I really try to make sure that I do that to the degree where if we have some big change and we’re planning the change in, in my younger years, I would only plan for when the change was happening.
13:45
Now I think about the change as a longer term thing that includes not just the technical change, but the planning behind it.
13:53
And so the blocking and tackling of it would be, you know, if you have an all hands, bring it up on the all hands every time you have the all hands, not just one time.
14:01
And then forget about it to the degree where people are like, yeah, we get it.
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We’re doing this big thing.
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And it’s like, OK, good.
14:06
I want you to feel like that.
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I want you to feel like it’s mundane because now it’s not going to surprise you and make you stressed out.
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And then I make sure that I intend all of the departmental meetings after I’ve met with all of the department heads and communicated the why to everybody.
14:20
And unfortunately, there’s probably still someone who’s going to feel like they didn’t get the message.
14:23
But that is the the way in which I do my very best to try to get to everybody.
14:28
Oh man, I don’t know how many episodes you’ve listened to of sales lead Duck, but I talk about this all the time.
14:34
It, I don’t care what you’re doing.
14:36
Change is hard for anybody, for any organization, and it frequently gets underestimated.
14:43
And that’s one of my top three things for success.
14:46
And anything you’re doing is being able to communicate the why.
14:49
And you said it perfectly.
14:51
It’s not about the why for the business, because that’s for you guys.
14:55
That’s not for me.
14:56
You have to come develop it at all levels down to the individual of like, why do I need to care about this?
15:04
And going through that exercise as a leader I think is really important.
15:08
It’s a great way to vet and validate what the heck it is you’re talking about.
15:12
Because if you can’t come up with a good why, a good compelling why, your strategy’s weak.
15:18
You got issues with your strategy or whatever it is you’re trying to do.
15:22
Yeah, I agree.
15:23
And also, if you can’t come up with a good compelling why for that individual on their level, then you owe it to them to tell them.
15:35
Ultimately, we still have to do this.
15:38
And I wanted to tell you directly that it might impact you because of XY and Z.
15:42
And I understand that it might impact you.
15:44
And here’s why we have to do this.
15:46
Even if it’s it’s, it’s the same kind of concept is like, we don’t need consensus, but we do want to get everybody’s opinion.
15:53
You know, I want to hear things from all places in all angles.
15:56
And then I want and they want me to make a decision about it.
15:59
I mean, that’s one of the things about leadership.
16:01
You can have the leader make the decision and you don’t have to necessarily take the accountability.
16:05
Like that’s helpful for the wider staff.
16:08
Yeah, it’s not, You know, I think too many leaders think because I said so is a motivator.
16:14
It’s not.
16:15
It’ll work in certain scenarios, but it is not is a very short shelf life.
16:21
You have to be able to lead from the front and I believe the only way you can do that is to be very effective in the accumulation communication skills.
16:28
What else do you do?
16:31
Because you mentioned already trying to communicate at all these levels, but that not necessarily easy.
16:35
How do you do that or what advice do you give people when it comes to that area of being a leader?
16:41
I try to have frank conversations with my staff after after I’ve developed rapport.
16:48
And how are you going to do that?
16:49
I mean, I think it’s important to have one on ones and skip levels regularly.
16:53
I don’t know how, you know, how stratified the organizations of the people watching this are, but having one on ones with your staff and and having those skip level meetings gives people a sense that you care and also allows you and forces you to care, right?
17:09
It’s, you know, back to the leader who says, because I said so that comes out of fear because they don’t want to be questioned.
17:16
And it also comes out of a certain distance that might have occurred over a period of time because they haven’t talked to the rank and file in a long time.
17:23
And so I like to make sure that I stay engaged.
17:26
So I understand that everybody’s a human being and I like to come to one on ones with an agenda so that it’s not just, you know, ’cause like if you don’t show up to a meeting with an agenda, everybody dreads it.
17:35
I don’t know what I’m going to say.
17:37
I don’t know what I’m going to track with you.
17:38
You have work you need to be working on.
17:40
You don’t feel like coming to meet with me.
17:42
It leads to a bad everything.
17:43
So having an agenda to track and then having metrics to pay attention to.
17:47
So I like to work back from the mission, vision values of the organization because in doing that, it allows you to understand what you can take to a number.
17:57
And I like to take everything to a number because if you can see it going up and to the right, we’re winning.
18:01
If it’s going down to the left, we’re losing.
18:04
And when I have that conversation with people, it allows them to hear it and see it and quantify it without bringing too much emotion to it because I’m just representing what we’re all seeing in the system.
18:18
And now we can work on resolving that together.
18:21
And then if I go back further in my career, I can stay with honesty that I didn’t do enough of that.
18:29
I gave a lot, especially as a younger leader.
18:32
I was shoulder to shoulder.
18:34
That’s a plus.
18:35
But I was also giving everybody high fives and just wanting them to have fun and be in a good mood.
18:41
And I still want that.
18:43
But I also want to find a way to communicate what success looks like, which I have learned from acting, asking frank questions to multiple different people.
18:53
They want that.
18:54
They want to know where they’re doing well and where they’re messing up so they can do better.
18:59
And if they don’t want that, they’re probably not a good fit for your team.
19:02
Right?
19:03
That messing up part good.
19:05
Hey, things are going great.
19:06
But I think that’s fairly easy.
19:08
But the messing up part, leveraging failure because everybody, especially in sales, you’re falling on your face on a regular basis.
19:15
It’s part of the role, part of the job.
19:18
How do you leverage those experiences as a leader?
19:27
Back to the listening.
19:29
I think that it’s easy as a leader.
19:32
Let’s say you’ve had a recorded session and you, you, you watch it back and you bring your sales engineer in and you’re going to talk through it about a deal that was lost, close lost.
19:41
As a leader, my instinct, our instinct often is to know what happened after 1000 times and just say, here’s the answer.
19:52
But like it’s the, it’s, you know, lead a horse to water, teach a man to fish, whatever, whatever you want to say.
19:58
It’s really important to understand that they have a sense of what went.
20:05
Differently from the result they expected or where they felt it go sideways or where they felt weak.
20:09
Because if I just show up and I say, here’s, here’s how to do better, the likelihood is they will not have processed the experience fully enough to know how to get to the better.
20:22
And so I always try to let them go through their experience and process it.
20:27
And everybody processes information differently.
20:29
I clearly process information verbally.
20:31
Some people need to take some time, some people need to write it down.
20:34
I really try very hard to let them be them and not presume that I know who they are because we’re just Co workers.
20:42
I don’t know you deeply.
20:44
I’ll let you reveal yourself to me.
20:46
And I think that is key to helping them progress because everybody learns and progresses differently.
20:51
We say that a lot, but I really try to live it.
20:53
And it’s, it ends up being one of the most interesting things about the job.
20:56
If you’re curious about the human experience, it ends up being a fascinating exercise as you meet all these new people and how they walk through the world.
21:05
Oh, yeah.
21:05
Yeah.
21:06
And there’s an element of vulnerability in there as well that I think is an essential component of you.
21:13
You mentioned building rapport.
21:15
I think that you can’t.
21:17
It’s hard to do if you’re not willing to make yourself vulnerable to your team.
21:21
Yeah.
21:22
I, I also think, I mean you, you mentioned it embracing failure.
21:27
I don’t try to hide when I have failed to buy employees.
21:33
And depending on the audience, I also don’t try to hide when I don’t know the answer to something.
21:39
You know, we’ve, we’ve got a big project ahead of us and I can tell you that I can project manage it and I can tell you that there’s a result we need to get to and I can tell you why.
21:50
I can also tell you that just like you, Chris, I’ve never done this before, but we do have to do it.
21:56
And so I’m going to, I’m going to stand a point and I’m going to take it when it comes our way, but I legitimately don’t know how to do this.
22:02
So let’s talk about it.
22:03
And like that, that’s meaningful.
22:06
That’s powerful.
22:06
Yeah.
22:07
Yeah.
22:07
I it’s, I’ve talked about this many times on sales lead dog that early in my career, I always felt like I had to have all the answers.
22:15
And some people come in all the time.
22:16
Chris, what do I do about this?
22:18
I’m like, oh, I know, blah, blah, blah.
22:20
And I really did take me.
22:22
I mean, it took me a little while, but I realized fairly quickly that I’m not helping my team.
22:26
I’m actually becoming a bottleneck, a center of gravity.
22:28
That’s not good.
22:30
But I think that’s a hard lesson for young.
22:32
You know, I think we all have to go through that.
22:34
You have to fall on your face, make these mistakes.
22:37
But you know, it’s our job as a leader, it’s to elevate, it’s to help people grow and and it’s also leveraging our experiences, right?
22:48
And saying, look, I, you know, for me as an entrepreneur, I tell people all the time I have No Fear about making decisions.
22:57
Yeah, because we have to make one to be able to move forward.
23:00
Yeah, let’s fail fast once I do, let’s fail fast.
23:03
And just.
23:03
Yes, yes, yeah.
23:07
It’s wild.
23:08
I mean, you know, you mentioned it a moment ago, but I’ve got all these scars and wounds and stories that pop up in my head.
23:16
You need to give them an opportunity to have those stories.
23:19
If you just feed them the answer, they’re not going to have that experience.
23:23
You know, they don’t.
23:24
They’re not going to understand why things went wrong or how things failed.
23:28
I mean, look, I can only tell you about my own life, but I can anecdotally say from other people in similar positions to me that that experience is common.
23:35
It’s rare that someone’s just instructed every way and they get everything perfect and then they land in the best possible spot.
23:41
Yeah, it does doesn’t happen.
23:43
What was the hardest element of being a leader for you to really develop a skill at or to get better at?
23:51
Maybe it’s something you still struggle with today.
23:54
The one we’ve just been talking about not having all the answers.
23:59
I even even at the larger organization, I, I had been in all the positions and so people thought I had all the answers.
24:08
And you know, there’s the, the monkey manager phrase where someone comes in and you’re supposed to hand the monkey back.
24:13
You’re not supposed to let it stay in your office.
24:15
And you know, I would, I would burn myself out and I would make, try to make myself everything to everybody.
24:22
I would have meetings scheduled literally back-to-back to back-to-back to back-to-back to back for 9 hours a day.
24:28
And then I had my own responsibilities to fulfill that I wasn’t getting done.
24:31
And until I started going through the exercise of helping people understand the why and making it very clear that I would not do it for them.
24:41
Then I everything opened up to the degree where, because I knew it didn’t come naturally to me, I came up with a series of questions of the first one was why?
24:52
The second one was, do they understand success?
24:55
The third one was in order for them to achieve this goal, is there anything that I need to move off of their plate for them to achieve it?
25:00
You know, asking these questions in the meeting so that a, they get that it’s their responsibility to get this thing done.
25:08
They also get that I understand how hard it’s going to be for them to do it, and I’m going to help them clear the path to get it done.
25:14
And that was a game changer for me.
25:16
That was huge.
25:17
Yeah, it is.
25:18
It’s but I like how you said that.
25:19
Is there anything I need to do, you know, take off your plate to help you succeed.
25:25
That’s some, I think in Almond a lot of leaders forget.
25:27
I know that’s something I’ve struggled with.
25:29
You know, it’s very easy to be a taskmaster.
25:33
Totally different paradigm to be a leader.
25:36
You know, there’s a big difference to being a taskmaster and a leader.
25:39
And I think that leader is is being having that empathy.
25:43
Put yourself in their shoes.
25:44
What are they struggling with?
25:45
What’s blocking them?
25:46
What can I do to eliminate those roadblocks?
25:49
Absolutely.
25:50
It also gives them a sense of commitment and accountability.
25:53
Like, oh Dang, all right, you’re helping me with this thing.
25:57
Now I can actually think actively about achieving this goal.
26:01
Before, all I in their position was thinking about was how annoying it was that I had one more thing to do.
26:06
But now I understand that it’s like something that I can really get done and and I have a partner on it.
26:10
So yes, what are you doing to build your culture at North Star?
26:15
Being this guy to the most to the biggest degree I can, you know, I there, there are phrases I will throw out like honesty, integrity, grit, and those things are true.
26:27
But I’m never afraid to say, I don’t know, let me find out.
26:31
I am trying to make sure that I am living the values that I talk about.
26:36
And I, you know, if I step in it, I admit it.
26:40
I, I try to let people know that I’m fallible and that I’m human and setting KPI’s and metrics because all of the stuff that I just described is relatively soft and human and friendly.
26:52
I find that numbers and dashboards and truth help me be that and also be the guy I just described myself.
27:03
And so people know when they’re coming into a meeting with me.
27:06
You’ve got to walk the walk.
27:08
But it’s also going to be fun.
27:09
We’re going to talk to each other, we’re going to enjoy each other.
27:11
We’re going to take a look at the numbers and we’re going to figure out how to get there together and making sure that people understand those numbers matter.
27:18
How do you create alignment?
27:20
Like, again, for us as leaders, we have to say, hey, this is our goal.
27:23
This is where we’re going to get to a year from now, three years, whatever that is.
27:28
What is your strategy beyond communication, which we’ve talked about, but what else are you doing to create that alignment and get everybody rolling in the same direction?
27:38
Objectives and key results or other people will call them.
27:41
OK Rs.
27:43
I used to work with a concept called Rocks that wasn’t specific enough for my brain.
27:49
Objectives and key results works well for the structure of the way I see things because we’ve got a high level objective.
27:54
We’ve got a key result or three that build up to that objective.
27:58
We’ve got tasks below that to get up to the key result.
28:02
So then you can define the objective as a leadership team, understand the key results, talking to your department heads.
28:10
Now they have a sense of ownership and you put them in their three different working groups, they figure out on their own, absent of me, what the tasks are that will lead up to that key result, right?
28:23
And then once they’ve got that key result, now they own it.
28:26
Evan doesn’t own it.
28:27
They own it because they own the tasks associated with it.
28:30
We have a check in meeting on a weekly basis to make sure that, oh, they’re, they’re timelining all those tasks.
28:35
So we’re working backwards from, let’s say, the end of the quarter.
28:37
We’re trying to get it done.
28:39
So you’ve decided 5 tasks that you think you’re going to ladder up to your key result, which is going to ladder up to the objective, right?
28:45
And so now we’re meeting on a weekly, daily basis, and the whole staff is having a conversation about it every Friday, right?
28:51
And so we all have clarity on what the different departments are doing and how they are achieving goals that will support other departments.
28:59
Because tribalism is the worst.
29:00
You know, departments not wanting to support other departments is the worst.
29:05
And so making sure that everybody understands the tasks and the key results and the timeline and the overall objective and using that methodology to get there has been hugely successful for me.
29:17
Yeah, I’ve done a lot of research around setting strategic goals and and then how do you actually achieve these?
29:29
And the reality is executive teams love to do off sites and let’s put together this incredible plan and this is all it’s going to be great.
29:41
But they suck at connecting that those strategic goals to execution to how do we actually get there?
29:50
Yes.
29:50
And so as I was listening to you, I’m like, that’s what it takes.
29:54
That’s the only way I know.
29:57
It’s the only way that I’ve discovered and I wish I had discovered it sooner.
29:59
I’ll be completely honest, it’s within the last like 2 years that it became obvious to me that that needed to happen.
30:06
And the first time I did it, it was like a light bulb.
30:10
I was like, Oh my God, this is how to get large groups to achieve something, anything beyond their individualized tasks.
30:18
It was, it is magical.
30:20
And it’s actually significantly easier than putting yourself through the harangue of not having a plan and just hoping for the best, going to your leadership and and having to deliver poor results, kicking it down the curb till next quarter, changing direction next quarter, and now this thing didn’t even happen.
30:38
Then the next quarter, you bring it up like it’s a fresh idea.
30:40
Again, just throwing mud at the wall like, hey, what’s going to stick?
30:46
That is not a strategy.
30:48
That’s just hope.
30:49
Hope it’s not a strategy and that’s, you know, it’s talking, you know, I’ve done a lot of coaching with entrepreneurs in my lifetime and, and that is I think one of the the key elements, especially for young entrepreneurs to understand that you have to put a stake in the ground.
31:05
This is where I’m going to get to by the end of the year.
31:08
But then you have to do the hard work to figure out how do I actually get there?
31:13
What is it going to take?
31:14
What are concrete, actionable things that I need to do to make that happen?
31:20
And it’s hard work to figure that out, but man, once you have it, now you’ve got a plan.
31:26
So plans are great, but you know, a lot of times we’re wrong.
31:33
How do you course correct as a leader when things aren’t going right?
31:39
I think that within the concept of the OK R, if one of those tasks didn’t lead to the result that was assigned to that because you’ve got, you know, you’ve got a result for each one, right?
31:52
And so if that didn’t succeed, then you can feel fairly confident that the rest of it isn’t going to ladder up.
31:59
And so you just reassess and you pivot and you got to make sure that you build in time for that in your overall project plan.
32:05
And if you know in the beginning of this whole made-up conversation that you’ve got a quarter to do it, you’re just making sure that you’re getting started early enough.
32:14
How many OK, Rs, rocks, whatever do people start to pursue in a Sprint of the third month in the quarter because they know they have to show up to the off site and say something about it?
32:25
You know, that that’s just not representative of actually wanting to achieve the goal.
32:28
It’s representative of wanting to keep your job.
32:30
And so, so I think that as a leader, reminding people of what your objectives and key results are and checking in regularly, like the weekly meeting I was talking about and, and making sure that if people are experiencing challenges that they raise the flag and you take it seriously and they are not penalized for that.
32:53
That’s right.
32:55
That I think that’s really important.
32:56
You need to say, I want you to raise the flag whenever you feel like you are being blocked by something to achieve whatever you committed to, because it’s your responsibility to get there.
33:08
And you need to tell me, come, come to the meeting with a plan.
33:10
I do not want you to just bring your problem.
33:12
I want you to bring a suggestion.
33:14
But if you come to the meeting with a suggestion and we agree that that’s a good way to do it.
33:18
My commitment to you is I’m going to go get that done so that you can keep doing the thing.
33:22
Exactly.
33:23
I, I got to research and find out the guys, the name of this guy because I, I love this story, but it years ago, Ford went outside the auto industry and hired a former CEO of Boeing to come and be their new CEO.
33:39
And I was reading an article, I think it was Wall Street Journal, about how he’s saying like his first executive leadership teams, everybody’s coming in with these big binders of all their plans and everything’s going on and everything’s color-coded on, you know, it’s like simple red, yellow, green, like thinking everything’s green, everything’s great, the whole world is great, right?
34:02
And he knows, like, that’s ********.
34:03
There’s no way company, this side, every single project, everything’s great.
34:07
So as he’s starting asking questions and really digging into this and letting people know, hey, look, it’s a real world, we’re going to have problems.
34:16
This is your opportunity.
34:18
Let’s talk about the problems of finding a solution.
34:20
He said it did take long.
34:21
Within weeks, binders were full of red.
34:24
And now he’s getting like, now we’re getting the real picture.
34:27
Now we can actually start affecting change 100%.
34:30
I, I hesitate to tie this back to my business, but I feel like I have to compliance can either be a check the boxes scenario in this example, the green check marks on the binder, or you humbly admit what you do not have in place in a accepting group of people that are on your team so that then you can go get it in place incrementally.
34:58
I, you know, all the stuff you and I have been talking about is why I started North Star strategy, so I could apply that to cybersecurity.
35:05
And so I could apply that as I’ve described it to you, to other businesses.
35:09
You know, I was doing it for whatever I was doing it for internally in my business.
35:13
But if I can take that same approach to other people’s staff and be this guy and I with all the things I just said and try to get them CMMC compliant or HIPAA compliant or whatever it’s going to be, I feel confident that that’s the way to achieve it.
35:26
Because without that level of honesty and integrity, you’re just going to get green check boxes because people just want to move past it because it’s not their expertise, it’s not their interest, It’s an obstacle to them.
35:37
And so helping them get a line for that is a big, a big piece of what I do and why I do it.
35:43
Yeah, I love that CRM.
35:46
Do you love it or do you hate it?
35:53
I love it, but I recognize the human challenges of a lot of data entry and garbage in, garbage out.
36:04
So I love a good clean database.
36:06
I love it.
36:07
And so that really lights me up.
36:10
But walking into some CRMS can be scary because of either a complete lack of information or just a a ton of unnecessary unhelpful information.
36:21
Yeah, yeah.
36:22
That’s the key is that I think so many people, again, leaders, and I’ve been this on the leaders because they’re the ones making the decisions.
36:31
You know, my advice to everybody, say, if you’re any piece of technology, but especially CRM, it has to be aligned with and connected to your strategic goals.
36:40
Well, that can happen if you’re doing the other stuff that we’ve talked about, right?
36:44
You have to know, hey, what are the key things that we need to be doing?
36:48
What are the key results we’re trying to achieve?
36:51
OK, what are the tasks that we’re doing to achieve that?
36:53
You don’t know that.
36:55
How are you making those decisions around your technology to find out what, what changes do we have to make?
37:01
Does our data support these initiatives?
37:05
You know, is are we making it?
37:06
Does our technology making it harder to achieve these things?
37:09
Yep.
37:09
If you’re not that, that all, it’s all connected.
37:13
It’s 100% all connected.
37:15
And I would say to anybody watching this who’s like really early in their leadership journey, think about it, but don’t overthink it.
37:23
Figure out what you can do, what you can count, something you can count, anything you can count that’s easy for you to count.
37:30
That will improve your business, your top line, whatever it is, your client satisfaction, something you can take to a number that you can track that doesn’t require you to be like a have a master’s degree in physics.
37:41
So that because you know, if it takes a long time to pull the data, you’re not going to pull the data.
37:45
But if you can just pick between 1:00 and 5:00 numbers that you’re going to try to track, your business will improve.
37:52
It might not necessarily go exactly the way you wanted it, but it’s a shoot for the moon land and the stars situation.
37:57
It’s going to get better.
37:59
Yeah, no, it’s so true.
38:00
And and yeah, I just did a presentation at the big CRM users conference a couple of months ago and I made the comment that every business has approximately 3 to 5 numbers.
38:12
If you know those numbers, you know the health of the business.
38:16
And again, that goes back to things we’re talking about, that those numbers that you’re looking at probably should be connected to these key initiatives, these things you’re trying to accomplish to drive results in your business.
38:30
Otherwise, why the heck are you using them right?
38:32
Yeah, I, I would even go so far as to say as you get more mature and you can tie those to your core values, it is part of everything.
38:39
So then you’re doing your annual reviews or your semi annual reviews and you’re tying that back to the metrics that the people are being graded upon, which you were talking about in your one on ones, which allows them to know what success looks like and how they’re doing.
38:52
So that when they get to their annual review, they’re not surprised and frustrated with you because you all were heads up in the beginning with each other, you know?
39:00
Exactly.
39:00
They know everybody’s aligned.
39:02
Everybody’s connected.
39:03
Yeah.
39:03
Everybody understands the why.
39:05
Yeah, Totally.
39:07
Big time.
39:08
And then it’s been great talking.
39:09
The time goes by so fast.
39:10
When?
39:11
Oh, my God, I had a great time.
39:12
I had no idea what you were talking about.
39:13
Awesome.
39:14
Oh, no, it’s awesome.
39:15
It’s so much fun.
39:16
If you want to reach out and connect with you, Evan, or if they want to learn more about Northstar strategies, what’s the best way for them to do that?
39:22
The best way for you to do it is to go to the website.
39:25
It’s right here, www.northstarstrategies.work.
39:29
As I told you, I like to work and all the information you’re going to need is there.
39:33
And my e-mail is Evan dot Dumichelle at northstarstrategies.worksoifyoudidntcatchthatthatsokyoucangetallthatinformationinourshownotes@impellercrm.com/sales Lead Dog, where you’ll get the show notes for this episode as well the as well as the 100 plus episodes of Sales Lead Dog.
39:51
Be sure to check that outreach out to Evan, connect with him.
39:55
Evan, thank you so much for coming on Sales Lead Dog.
39:58
He’s been a lot of fun.
39:59
Yeah, I had a blank.
40:01
Welcome to the Sales Lead Dog pack.
40:03
I am happy to be here.
40:05
Thank you very much.
40:09
As we end this discussion on Sales Lead Dog, be sure to subscribe to catch all our episodes on social media, follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram, watch the videos on YouTube, and you can also find our episodes on our website at impellercrm.com/sales Lead Dog.
40:29
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