Leave Nothing To Chance

 

Being good at sales doesn’t mean you’re instantly a good leader. And so, Ben Ward spent several years learning to transition from being a good salesman into being a good leader. In this episode’s Part 1, the discussion revolves around sales and leadership. Ben shares the pillars that he thinks are the key to success for you, your team, and your business. He learned essential keys during the transition to being an effective leader. These key takeaways were written in his book and shared in this episode, along with guiding principles. Tune in and learn how you can transition into being a good leader!

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Ben Ward “Sellership” The Transition Into Leadership Part 1

What a treat this is going to be. You’re going to love Mr. Ben Ward. Ben, we have been trying to do this for a little bit of time. We’re finally together.

It’s so good to be here. It’s interesting. Some things happen in life. There are some detours, you keep pushing, and making it happen. Thanks for having me.

It’s my pleasure. Ben has been the best-selling author of a book called Sellership. He’s got a new book that we’re eventually going to talk about because we’re going to do two interviews. Ben is somebody who has been helping people to achieve in the sales world for a number of years. He’s an entrepreneur, speaker, coach, dad, and ping-pong player.

I fell in love with pickleball but with my ping-pong background. I’ve played since I’ve been in diapers. I live in San Clemente and a bunch of us come out and play pickleball these days.

It’s amazing how pickleball has become a huge sport. I had never heard of it. Jon Huntsman and his family over in Utah do the Huntsman Games every year for senior athletes. The first year I was eligible, I was 50. I went to throw the shot put. There was a bunch of these old guys registering for something called Pickleball. I was like, “They have got to be kidding. What do you do? Do you throw pickles at each other?” I watched some of these guys in their 70s and 80s getting on in the pickleball court. I’ve become a fan of pickleball ever since.

They’re inspiring. Some of those 70 to 80-year-olds out there are cranking in it. It’s amazing.

Let’s talk about a few of the great concepts that you talk about because they’re not only inspiring for leadership but they also help people in my industry, direct selling, to grow their organizations, customer bases, and distributor bases. Let’s lay down a few of them and talk about emptying the coins.

Benjamin Franklin said something that pierced me years ago as far as investing in yourself. He said, “Empty the coins of your purse into your brain and your brain will fill your purse.” When I heard that, I’m like, “I have to apply that in my life.” It was that day that I started realizing that I need to invest in myself and work harder. Jim Rohn said, “You need to work harder on yourself than you do on your job.” I thought at that time, “I need to spend not only time but I need to spend some of the money that I earned in investing and learning from other people who have been there.” I love that little couplet from Benjamin Franklin. It has been powerful.

I didn’t realize quite the level of statesmanship that he had because I knew him as a historic figure here until I was over in Paris a few years ago. I didn’t realize his role in European affairs as well as American affairs and how the Europeans look at him as far as his role in the world. I was in a restaurant. It was ironic because it’s where the French Revolution was planned. Robespierre was a French politician who led the French Revolution.

It was the restaurant where Robespierre had signed in blood the oath for the French Revolution. With that whole genre and everything else, it used to be Franklin’s favorite restaurant in Paris. I had forgotten his role as a statesman representing our country in France way back. That’s a brilliant point. Take the money, reinvest it, and keep growing yourself. It’s the most important product that you have.

To those that are reading this, you are investing in yourself. You have choices like crazy on what to spend your time and energy on. It’s the fact that you’re here reading this, maybe this is your first time reading or you’ve read a bunch of his episodes but as you continue to empty the coins of your purse into your brain, your brain will fill your purse. I salute you for tuning in and I challenge you to continue to invest in yourself every single day. Time is money. Even though he’s not charging you to read this, as you continue to learn from incredible minds, you will continue to grow in incredible ways.

Let’s talk about another one of the concepts that you talk about a lot, 4PLB™. I hope you’re taking notes at home. You mentioned Jim Rohn. Jim was the master of people having a diary, daytime, or whatever you want to call it these days. Maybe it’s your phone but please take notes. The stuff that Ben is sharing is magical, life-changing, and inspiring. It’s going to help you to grow as a person and help grow your sales, income, and team. Tell us about 4PLB™.

 

As you continue to learn from incredible minds, you'll continue to grow in incredible ways. Click To Tweet

 

I’ve led sales teams for twenty years and learned that there are four essential skills that every sales leader needs to master. If you lead anybody in your life of any kind especially if you’re in direct sales or any sales role, there are four major keys that you want to dive deep into and get good at. 4PLB™ stands for 4 Pillar Leadership Blueprint. The first pillar is Culture. As you build your team, what is the culture? Culture is the way you do things around here, the way things are done, and operate, and what it’s like to be part of your team. It’s the environment.

How do you create that? The first pillar is all about getting the environment right where you have people seeing each other as human beings or people rather than being ordered by the boss as an object. Culture is the first pillar and I go deep into culture training. I help sales organizations and sales leaders create a very intentional purpose-driven culture because culture is going to form and happen or you can shape it and design it on purpose.

The first pillar is all about getting the culture and environment right. The second key that I’ve found in building and leading teams is an element of high productivity, especially in a busy world. There are so many distractions. How do you get ultra-clear and ultra-focused? Included in productivity is energy management. How do you manage the energy that you have in a given day as a leader? A lot of us leaders are responsible to sell ourselves to lead by example and teach, coach, mentor, and train others around us. To sell and be highly productive in our day-to-day is an absolute key as a leader.

If you miss this one pillar and go straight for one of the other pillars, which I’m going to share, it’s like a three-legged stool missing 1 of the 3rd legs. There’s high productivity. One of the strategies I want to talk about is a book that we’re going to be doing another episode on. One of the high productivity hacks is you’ve got Pluck the FUD. We will talk about that later but I wanted to introduce that.

The easy part of achieving success is learning the skills. The hard part is learning to guard your mind and take action despite fear. There are a whole bunch of strategies we will talk about in our next episode. How do you become highly productive in a very busy world? That’s the second pillar. There are a bunch of things that we will talk about and that you have at the top of your head as you’re reading this. What do you do to be highly productive? What does your schedule look like?

The first pillar is Culture. The second pillar is High Productivity. The third pillar is Sales and Selling in a way that honors people. We can talk about that for a long time. The fourth pillar is Recruiting and Retaining. It’s building the right team the right way. If we zoom in on a leader leading a sales team, those four areas, culture, productivity, sales, recruiting, and retention, are the absolute key to driving high results in sales and leadership.

 

 

I love the fact that you’ve got the word blueprint in there too. Wherever you are, every one of them started with a blueprint. Let’s look at your thoughts on that. How do they blueprint their lives and careers to manifest the type of success that we want for them?

It’s a reality. If we want to get to where we want to go, we have to get very clear on our intended destination. It’s critical for us to create a blueprint. One of the biggest blueprints that I’ve found is I got sucked into the trap of, “How do I succeed? What do I need to do for a long time?” As soon as I learned this little master strategy, it was like its own blueprint in itself. It’s who rather than what I need to do and how I improve my sales. I learned from a mentor who is already getting the results that I want to get as a leader. It’s identifying who, not how.

It’s easy to get sucked into, “I’ve got to figure out how to do it, what do I need to do, and then drum up all the things.” That list goes on forever but it’s identifying who’s already doing it. How can I find the person that’s already achieving the results I want? Success leaves clues. Being able to model after highly successful people that are already getting the results that I’m getting and hitching my trailer to that person has become a mini-microcosm blueprint in itself. It’s that one tip.

You blueprint what’s working for them and identify how to make them. It’s like a house. If you want to build a certain house, you draw it up and get the blueprints and ingredients. You can duplicate it and achieve similar results as other people. I love that idea of modeling, success leaves clues, and who’s doing it, not how. There’s a great book by Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan called Who Not How. It goes deeper into that idea as well.

One of the things I love to hear you talk about as I was watching one of your videos is The Seven Steps To Leverage Success. We talk about leverage and network marketing all the time. We’re in a leveraged business and most businesses. Commercial real estate is a leveraged business. Insurance to some degree is a leveraged business. Let’s talk about it in terms of direct selling to people. Talk about those seven steps, what they are, and how they can apply them.

Brian Tracy has been a dear friend and a mentor of mine for many years. He’s a legend. I’ve read all of his books. He has written 80 best-selling books. Years ago, we were at a mastermind that he came to. We flew him in and had this celebrity guest speaker come in. There was a group of us, maybe twenty. We were all leading sales teams. He mentioned something that hit me like a ton of bricks across the head.

 

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It hit me so hard when he said, “Being good at sales and leading other people in sales are two different skillsets.” At that time, I’ve been a high-performing salesperson that just transitioned into leadership. I had the first team that I was starting to run. I became a manager. When he said that, I found that it was exactly what I was going through. I was good at sales but I didn’t know how to duplicate myself and successfully lead others.

I share that to say that during the next fifteen years of my life, I went on a crusade to figure out what it takes for somebody to successfully transition from being good yourself at sales to then leading other people. You asked about the seven steps but the context of that is it’s the seven essential keys to go from selling to leading. I wrote this book and Brian wrote the foreword. We coined the word sellership. How do you transition successfully into leadership? John, should we talk about a couple of these keys?

Sure. I love watching it on YouTube. I was getting inspired. I was watching it late at night and thinking, “I’ve got to stop watching this because I was getting too inspired. I was going to be up all night.” Please go ahead.

To successfully transition into leadership starts with a foundation. One of my favorite words is called Genshai. A mutual friend of ours, Dan McCormick, is the one who introduced that to me. His good friend, Kevin Hall, wrote a book called Aspire. He’s the first that I’m aware of that brought to life this ancient Hindi word Genshai. I have this little Genshai coin right here. On the back, it says, “To never treat another person in a manner that would make them feel small, including yourself.”

Genshai is the foundation of Sellership. It’s this idea of how do you transition from sales into leadership in a powerful way where you can make an impact? There are leaders and there are those who lead. There are people that have leadership by title and then there are leaders that lead and inspire. The first master strategy to high influence as a leader is a deep foundation of Genshai and treating people big. Big does not mean soft. Treating somebody big doesn’t mean pretending to believe in them.

Treating somebody big starts with a foundation. How do you see them as human beings? Do you see them as a person with needs and fear, who experiences joy and pain, and go through real struggles? Do we see them straightforwardly? Do we see the people we lead as an object? There are three main objects that we do. We objectify people as human beings.

 

 

We turn people into objects, either an obstacle that’s in our way and moves them out of our way, a vehicle where we’re using them to get what we want or possibly the most dishonoring object is the third where we do this to human beings, “They’re irrelevant. Maybe they don’t even matter. We don’t even see them. They don’t even matter to us.” Genshai is the foundation. This is the first key to high influence to effectively inspire the very best out of the people that we lead. It starts at the foundation of Genshai. It’s to never treat another person in a manner that would make them feel small.

It’s biblical to you and me. To somebody reading perhaps that doesn’t have a Christian faith or Jewish faith, that’s a principle in every religion in the world. It’s to treat everybody that way. It’s like that old thing. When the camera is rolling, everybody is on but the second camera stops rolling, does the actor, athlete, politician, or famous person all of a sudden treat the waiter or the bus boy poorly? Do they treat them with as much respect as they would if the camera was rolling? I love that principle. Dan has mentioned that to me. You hammered Genshai. What is the origin of that word? Is it Sanskrit?

It’s ancient Hindi.

I love words. I’m a word junkie. I told you this last time. I write these things down. I’ve got yellow sticky notes all over my computer from stuff that people say. Genshai is now on there. You made the wall of fame here at my computer.

The first key is a foundational piece. There are seven of them. We can go through all of them. The second one is very tactical. Your readers could gain a lot right away that they could sink their teeth into it and apply it immediately. It flows from a foundation of Genshai. If you find yourself not caring about the people you lead, that’s a starting point. You’re probably not going to be able to gain the highest influence from those that are under your charge and you’re serving if that piece is missing.

You have a strong foundation of Genshai where they know that you care and that you believe in them. The second key is critical if you want to influence somebody. I’ve learned this in the trenches leading tens of thousands of salespeople and sales leaders over the years. I’ve found that to influence somebody, you’ve got to meet them where they are. The second key is the vital few. This is the way to meet somebody where they are. It’s a simple mind, heart, and feet assessment.

 

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The principle of this is to effectively influence somebody. Before I go and say, “Follow me,” the first key is I find you. How do you find somebody that you lead? How do you meet them where they are at? I found that the vital few or these three keys are magic to influence somebody. It’s a very simple model. Where are their minds? What’s going on in their minds? You can find out where their minds are at with simple questions that are not rocket science like, “John, how are you showing up? This is going on.”

You want to get an insight into where their mind is at and look for cues. Are they showing up like a victim or a creator? A creator is like, “I’ve had a rough go but we’re fighting through it. Things are things are good.” Maybe they’re battling cancer in their family, they’re sick with COVID, they had the worst sales year, week, or month, or whatever the case may be. You want to look for cues. Are they a victim of circumstance or a creator coming at it from an empowering perspective?

You want to get some cues. Where are their minds at that will help you to know how you can help navigate and lead? Where are their minds and heart? What’s their why? What are their dreams? You don’t know enough about the person you lead if you don’t know what makes them tick and what gets them up out of bed in the morning. That’s an indication into their hearts. Their hearts are also their goals. What are they pushing for? Why? What does that mean to them? If they achieve that goal and dream, what does it bring into their lives? What does it mean?

That’s an indication. We don’t know enough about the person we lead if we don’t know what’s going on in their hearts. Where are their minds and hearts? Here’s the key. I love this. As I teach sales leaders all over America, this is a game-changer because maybe their feet are like Eeyore. Maybe they’re slow like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. They’re slow and not moving or they’re like Fred Flintstone flying, “Yabba-Dabba-Doo.” They’re flying but in the wrong direction or they’re flying in the right direction like a hamster wheel and they’re not getting traction.

Here’s the key to the vital few or the three-part model. What controls our feet? The feet are the results. What are they doing with their time? What are numbers looking like? What are their results? What’s extremely valuable as a leader is knowing that your mind and heart control your feet. If your feet are not headed in the right direction, there’s always a heart problem and/or a mind problem. Oftentimes, both are connected. If you get the mind and heart right, the feet will fly and start achieving the goals that you want.

Let me ask you this. Let’s talk about something that’s going to shock them. Tell them about eating the frog. This is golden stuff. Go ahead.

 

 

Many of you may have read a timeless book by Brian Tracy, Eat That Frog. He wrote this book and the premise of Eat That Frog is Mark Twain. He said, “If you know that you’re going to have to eat a frog in a day, you might as well eat it for breakfast or first thing in the morning. Get it done.” Mark Twain elaborates a little bit. He’s like, “Imagine if you know you’re going to have to eat a frog. You have to eat it before you go to bed that night.”

You’re like, “I don’t want to eat it yet. I’ll eat it after I eat breakfast, I’ll eat breakfast and then cram it down my throat.” You wrecked your breakfast and your morning. At that point, you’re full. You’re like, “I’ll eat it for lunch.” There’s the anticipation of having to eat that nasty frog. You keep pushing it and come lunchtime, it’s like, “I’ll need it for dinner.” Now you wrecked your whole day and you’re going to have to eat that thing before you go to bed.

The principle is to get it done. It’s the things that we don’t want to do that we know we need to do that move the needle. These are the things that make the biggest difference in our work and life. Those are the frogs. The sooner we’re like, “I’m afraid. I don’t want to do it. It’s nasty,” we get done what we have to get done. We have created victory over the whole day. Everything else we do will be easier. We’re more confident because we ate our frog.

I love that because we’ve all got them every day. Every day there’s something including. Before we spoke here, I spent time doing something that I was uncomfortable with but I knew it had to get done. It was a time thing for my business that I had to get finished early. I was like, “Do I go work out first? Do I eat first? Let me go get my workout done. Let me ease into the day.” All of a sudden, “I’m interviewing Ben. I’ve got some other things I got to do. Let me get it done.”

You’re so right with this principle. What I thought was going to take me probably 2 hours or 45 minutes, I got it done. It was not uncomfortable. It was necessary. We all have things in our business or more importantly in our lives that we have to do. Nobody wants to go to the doctor and get a checkup annually.

We need to eat that frog. Do we need to deal with whatever it is?

 

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We all got them. I love that principle. It leads me to another principle. This is a kick in the RAS. Ben, explain.

I’m sure this is the case for those that are reading. You’re a leader. You’re leading things. You’re out there selling and building teams. You’re entrepreneurs. What I’ve found is people will ask, “What’s your biggest advice?” I’m sure you get asked this question, John, a bunch and our readers do too. Here’s one of the biggest pieces of advice in life to succeed. I find myself answering that question, “What’s my number one advice?” You got to give yourself a kick in the RAS.

I’m going to go a little bit scientific with you. We all have in the back of our brain the Reticular Activating System. It’s about the size of an eraser and/or maybe the nail of your pinky finger. It’s back here. It’s what filters what we focus on. I’m in my home office here and there are a million things that are right here that I can focus on. There’s an infinite amount of distractions and things around us all the way down to thinking about your stomach. Are you hungry?

Maybe you’re thirsty, you have a stomachache, or you have to go to the bathroom and on and on forever. There are things that we could fixate and focus on. Our Reticular Activating System saves us because it’s what filters are focused on. Here’s the principle. The Reticular Activating System is what laser focuses on what’s important to us. It’s almost like an antenna.

That’s why written goals are so important because we write them down. All of a sudden, our Reticular Activating System filters our focus and sends signals to help us get what we want. When we know what we want, our eyes will start to see things that will help us get what we want. Our mouths will start saying things to help us get what we want.

Our arms will start reaching toward things that will help us get what we want. Our legs and feet will start moving towards things that will help us get what we want. The key is you’ve got to give yourself a kick in the RAS. It’s the filter of your focus. What do you want more of in your life? Give yourself a kick. Get very clear on what you want and what you’re pursuing so that the signal of our brains can do its magic. The subconscious mind can start attracting the things that we want.

 

 

Too many of us are fuzzy. When we’re not clear on what we’re pursuing, all of a sudden, we’re like Alice in Wonderland. When Alice goes and she’s wandering, and the Cheshire Cat comes up. She’s like, “Cheshire, how do I get to where I’m going?” Cheshire says something so wise, “That depends a great deal on where you want to go.” Alice said, “I don’t know where I want to go.” The Cheshire Cat said, “It doesn’t matter which road you take.”

A superpower to you is getting very clear on your intended destination. Not only give yourself a kick in the booty to get to work but also give yourself a kick in the RAS spelling out, “What exactly is my intended destination?” Until we have that clarity on what we want, it almost doesn’t matter what road we take. We will find ourselves drifting like a river. The path of least resistance is what makes rivers and mankind crooked. You don’t want to take the path of least resistance. You want to take a very intentional path. Give yourself a kick in the Reticular Activating System.

I’ve never heard it put quite that way before but it makes so much sense. Let’s do this, Ben. Here are a couple of quick questions and we will close session one. What’s it like working with Brian Tracy? You have a real working relationship. You mentioned that and all of that. I can’t remember Brian not being around. I’ve been around for years. He was around long before I was. We crossed paths a few times. I certainly heard him speak on a number of occasions. I owned a bunch of his books and old tapes. I still own tapes, believe it or not. It has been so long. He has been around. I’ve been around. What’s it like working with him? I believe he’s been a mentor to you.

He’s so gracious. He loves to give back. One of the things that he is telling everybody he can is, “The future belongs to those who ask.” Over the years, I’ve reached out to him asking. It’s amazing. I feel so surreal because I have his cell phone. We text each other from time to time. What I’ve found is I started reaching out and asking him, “Brian, this is probably crazy but would you mind giving a testimonial on this?” He’s like, “Ben, the future belongs to those who ask that. You bet you. I would be delighted.”

With my book, I asked him, “Brian, you’ve inspired me so much with this idea of successfully transitioning from sales into leadership. You’ve helped me to go on a pursuit. How do you do that? How do I help other sales leaders duplicate themselves? I would love to have your stamp on my new book.” He’s like, “Ben, you bet you. I would be delighted.” An undertone of the future belongs to those who ask.

I want to challenge you as you’re reading, who are your mentors? Who inspired you? Who have you learned from? Who has helped you to become great? Reach out to them and let them know how much they have meant to you. Don’t be afraid to ask for something that’s going to serve other people around you and you as well, including them in that. My advice to you is what Brian has shared, “The future belongs to those who ask.” He’s a humble and incredible human being.

 

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I’ve never met Brian but I’ve met a number of other people at that level. I spent a week with Bob Proctor on a cruise a number of years ago. It’s the same thing. You saw them in the hallway and you were like, “Mr. Proctor.” He’s like, “Mr. Proctor was my dad. My name is Bob.” I said, “I’ve got a question.” That was ten minutes. I remember when I was a kid. I was in my early twenties.

I went to see Tom Hopkins in New Jersey. I was still living up there at that time. He was coming out of the bathroom. He was about to start a seminar about twenty minutes later. I stopped him and he said, “What’s your biggest problem?” I said, “My biggest problem is I’m afraid to talk to people.” He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out his business card, and wrote on the back of it, “Do what you fear most.” He handed that to me.

I probably had that thing in my wallet for 30 years. I don’t know what happened to it. When I finally got what I thought was successful enough, I wrote to him, and then he wrote me back. It’s the same thing. The point is the bigger and more successful people in the world are successful because they help a lot of people. They’re good people. Let me ask you one last question for this round.

Can I interject something before you do?

Absolutely.

You’ve touched on this a couple of times. There’s so much wisdom in what you shared. There’s a certain picture on my desktop. There’s a little buffalo with a storm going on here. That’s my screensaver. This is a buffalo. Buffaloes are known to charge straight into the storm. Tom Hopkins invited you to do the thing you fear. This picture inspires me and motivates me to be like a buffalo. There are the things that I fear. What is it that I’m afraid of? I charge straight into it.

 

 

What is fascinating is that somehow, we don’t know the reason why buffaloes intuitively charge into the storm but over the years I’ve thought about this. The reason why is that they know intuitively that the fastest route to calm weather is on the backside of the storm. They charge straight into it and because of that, they experience the calm much faster than if they tried to move away from the storm and the storm chases them.

It takes hours and days. They don’t keep moving from the storm but instead, they’re going straight through it. The calmest weather is on the backside of that storm. I challenge you to be like a buffalo and what John taught us from Tom Hopkins. What is it that you fear? Eat the frog and charge straight into what it is that you fear. That’s a major recipe for success.

I went up to South Dakota years ago at the height of COVID. I was driving my wife and my kids crazy. Like you, I’ve traveled all the time for years. All of a sudden, I’m at home every day. My wife said, “Can you go on vacation?” I said, “Where do you want to go?” She sent me on vacation. I had never been here. I drove up to South Dakota and spent a week looking at buffaloes.

It’s the most fascinating animal I’ve ever seen. They do that. I never thought of it that way. They run into the storm instead of running away from the storm. Confront the storm because you’re going to have to confront it eventually. They’re wise enough to know. Sometimes they’re smarter than we are. Let me touch on one other thing. How do they get your book?

You can get it on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes. You can get it in any of those three ways. You can download it and listen to it. Brian Tracy reads the foreword and I read the book. It’s a parable. It’s an easy-to-read story about a salesperson who has transitioned into leadership and experienced all the common challenges. It would only take a couple of hours to listen to it. You can listen to it at 1.5 speed and be done in two and a half hours or you can pick it up and read it in an afternoon.

The question I have to ask you is this. Going back in my career, everybody thinks I’ve been in network marketing my whole life and I haven’t. I had a little segue in the early ’80s when the company I was with had some trouble with the FDA. I stepped out, went into the insurance business, and worked for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. I’ll never forget my boss. He’s a guy named Nick Donato.

 

 

Unfortunately, he passed away a couple of years back. Nick was a great guy and another mentor of mine. Nick had been a great agent. He was very successful. In the insurance business, as you know because you train insurance people and others, you make a minimum of 55% on the contract. A $1,000 premium is $855 but if you go out with an agent as a manager, you make about 2% of that.

If you go out for the night and spent three hours sitting in somebody’s living room, you made about $20. The agent that writes the policy, sometimes who’s new to the business makes $500 to $600 or more. I’ll never forget driving home with him from one of those appointments. He said, “I’ve got to get out of management and get back to personal production.”

I remember that. That was years ago and all of that. How do you help people deal with that? I’ve done it most of my career, whether it’s insurance, real estate, or anything that has a management role. How do you help somebody to cross that? I know Sellership does but tease them to buy the book. We want you to buy the book. He has done the one thing because I know some of my distributors are reading this.

Some of the distributors that are not on my downline but are in Dan’s downline read it. There’s my friend, Joe, and some of the other guys I work within the industry that are colleagues. Their downlines read this as well. They all wrestled with that sometimes, “Do I spend more time recruiting or helping my downline recruit?” Help us cross that bridge.

Sales is the short game. Building a team and recruiting is the long game. I work with sales leaders all over. There’s a struggle of, “I could make more money going and selling personally myself rather than dealing with all of the challenges and some of the babysitting that might have to happen as you’re going through.” Let me share chapter eight. There’s a formula for effective coaching and teaching. The Four-Part Formula that I’ve learned is absolute magic. In personal mentoring with sales leaders, this becomes a linchpin or the critical piece on how to successfully lead other people.

Here’s the reality. It’s going to take you all day to rescue your people, resolve concerns, go through, and convince them but it takes five minutes to challenge. There’s a formula or a shortcut on do you pierce through to gain traction as a leader to help drive your people into action. We talked about in chapter eight the four-part coaching go-to model.

Chapter nine is The Four Laws Of Leadership. These laws are magic for helping to inspire the very best out of the people that you lead. My publisher was like, “You don’t need to put so much rich and dense content in here. Maybe let’s take some of the content out.” I’m like, “There’s no way.” He said, “They get the book. They’re not going to need you.” I’m like, “That’s good because leaders don’t create followers. Leaders create more leaders.” My goal here is to help you to transition successfully into leadership and share a ton of key principles to help you do that right here.

This show is helping people to start. We all have goals for the second half of 2022 already. It’s remarkable that we’re already there. We’re going to come back and tell you about Pluck the FUD. That is Ben’s upcoming book. He’s going to tell you in that interview what Pluck the FUD means and what it means more importantly for you. Ben, you will come back and do that show with me.

I look forward to it.

Thank you.

Thank you. It has been awesome.

I enjoyed it.

 

Important Links

• Ben Ward
• Sellership
• Huntsman Games
• 4PLB™
• Who Not How
• Brian Tracy
• YouTube – Ben Ward Sales Leadership
• Dan McCormick – LinkedIn
• Aspire
• Eat That Frog
• Amazon – Sellership
• Audible – Sellership
• iTunes – Sellership
• Pluck the FUD

 

About Ben Ward

Hi, I’m Ben!

Over the past 21 years I’ve coached tens of thousands of sales leaders, helping them lead their teams to success.

Experience has taught me that being good at sales personally and being good at leading others are two totally different skillsets. It’s as though they are on two opposite sides of a canyon.

I help bridge that canyon.

I teach leaders how to:
*Successfully transition from selling to leading
*Become highly productive as a leader
*Create a thriving team culture & environment
*Grow team sales
*Recruit and Retain the right people the right way

I specialize in virtual and in-person speaking, coaching, training, workshops, digital courses and mastermind groups.

As a leader, do you want to…

💥Earn the respect of the people you lead?
💥Inspire action that drives results?
💥Develop deeper relationships of trust?
💥Get leveraged results through the efforts of others?
💥Draw out the best in the people you lead?

I’d like to help you make this a reality.

Trust me, I’ve been there—and I’ve come back for you!

Reach out to me at ben@forwardleadership.com

A little more about me personally:

I’m a husband, dad, and I love to play ping-pong. I began playing when I was in diapers, and have consistently played throughout my life. And I might always keep a ping pong paddle in the trunk of my car 😂

I’m a ‘born in the trenches’ leader starting my career building door-to-door summer sales teams while I was in college. I developed the highest producing sales region at Firstline Security, a $100 million dollar Inc.500 company. I became the #1 producer in the company of over 2,000 sales people nationwide, generating over $37 million dollars in revenue with my teams. Within 5 years I went from earning $7 an hour stringing tennis rackets, to having earned my first 7 figures in sales and leadership commission by the time I was 26 years old.

I started my own company, grew it to 2,000+ salespeople nationwide and took the company public. Since then, I have been passionately teaching leaders how to lead their teams to success!

I love to teach, and I love the gospel of Jesus Christ. After my morning exercise routine, I volunteer to teach an early morning church class for high school students to help them kick off their school day in a great way learning about Jesus. This has become one of my favorite parts of each day.

I live in San Clemente CA, with my wife Sheri and three kids.
I’d love to connect with you, reach out to me here on LinkedIn, or directly at ben@forwardleadership.com.

Learn more about me at:
benward.com