Chapter 13.
Tell the Truth Quickly

Question: How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Answer: Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.

—Abraham Lincoln

Great leaders always share a common habit: they tell the truth faster than other managers do.

Steve recalls his work with helping managers motivate salespeople. (And notice that this doesn’t just apply to salespeople. It applies to all people.)

I always found that people would tell me about their limitations, and I would listen patiently and try to talk them out of their limitations, and they would try to talk me back into what their limitations really were. Limitation seemed to be their fixation.

One day, I was working with a salesperson in a difficult one-on-one coaching session, and finally I just blurted it out (I guess I was tired, or upset, or was having a stressful day), and I said, “You know, you’re just lying to me.”

“What?” he said.

“You’re lying. Don’t tell me there’s nothing you can do. There’s a lot you can do. So let’s you and I work with the truth, because if we work with the truth and we don’t lie to each other, we are going to get to your success so much faster than if we do it this way, focusing on your self-deceptions.”

Well, my client was just absolutely shocked. He stared at me for a long time. It’s not always a great relationshipbuilder to call someone a liar. I don’t recommend it. If I hadn’t been as tired as I was, I don’t think I would have done it, but the remarkable thing was, my client all of a sudden began to smile! He sat back in his chair and he said, “You know what? You are right.”

I said, “Really?”

He said, “You are right, that’s not the truth at all, is it?”

“No, it’s not.”

“You are right,” he said. “There’s a lot I can do.”

“Yes, there is.”

This is the main lie you hear in the world of business and especially in sales: “There’s nothing I can do.” This is the “I am helpless and powerless” lie. The truth is, there is always a lot you can do. You just have to choose the most creative and efficient way to do it. As Shakespeare wrote, “Action is eloquence.”

One way a salesperson we know starts her day with action is to ask herself, “If I were coaching me, what would I advise myself to do right now? What creative action would bring the highest return to me?”

Another quick cure for the feeling that “there’s nothing I can do” is to ask ourselves, “If I were my customer or my prospect, what would I want me to do?”

And what you can always do is GIVE. Great salespeople, and any people who lead their teams in performance and who prosper the most from their profession, are great givers. They stay in constant touch with their power to do so much by constantly giving their internal and external clients beneficial things—helpful information, offers of service, respect for their time, support for their success, cheerful friendly encounters, sincere acknowledgments, the inside scoop—giving, giving, giving all day long, always putting the client’s wants and needs first. They always ask the best questions and always listen better than anyone else listens. As that commitment grows and expands, and those gifts of attention are lavished on each client in creative and ongoing communications, that salesperson becomes a world-level expert in client psychology and buying behavior. And that salesperson also realizes that such a dizzying level of expertise can only be acquired through massive benefit-based interaction!

A new week begins, and this thought occurs: “There’s so much good I can do, I just can’t wait.”