Oftentimes, the difference between the silver medalist and the gold medalist is by a hair. And that small difference makes all the difference. Listen closely as Glenn Poulos provides nuggets of wisdom from his 30 years of business experience. He emphasizes taking action in the face of fear and uncertainty, staying competitive, mastering sales, and distinguishing between marketing and sales. He stresses that leaders should make decisions and be a leader rather than just “doing”. With his insights into growing two multimillion-dollar organizations over the last 30 years, anyone can be successful in small business.
[00:00 - 10:51] Mastering Sales: The Key to Small Business Success
• Glenn Poulos' backstory from a civil servant to a successful founder and sales leader
• The key skill and separating factor to creating two multimillion-dollar companies
• Understanding the difference between marketing and sales for small business owners
• Never Sit in the Lobby is a book about 57 techniques for building a business and growing a career in selling
[10:52 - 19:41] Unlocking the Secrets of Engaging Customers and Growing Your Business
• A common mistake salespeople make is implied familiarity also breeds contempt
• A sales principle to keep in mind: The customer is the one closing, not the salesperson
• Salespeople often try to close customers too quickly without engaging them properly
[19:42 - 24:03] The Separating Factor Between Excellent Leaders and Everyone Else
• The job of the boss is to make decisions and be a leader, not do everything
• The book Never Sit in the Lobby contains 30 years of experience in creating successful multimillion-dollar organizations
• Reach out to Glenn Poulos!
Interested in crafting the perfect pitch and closing deals? Connect with Glenn through his website Glenn Poulos. Also, check out his book Never Sit in the Lobby.
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Tweetable Quotes
“The separating factor from a series of successes and nonsuccess is taking action in the face of fear, danger, uncertainty, or any other misgiving that you might have.” - Glenn Poulos
“The real people that make a difference are the ones that take action. They put their money where their mouth is. They take a step forward when other people are hesitating. And these little differences make all the difference.” - Glenn Poulos
[00:00:00] The real people that make a difference are the ones that take action. You know? Mm-hmm. And they put their money where their mouth is. They take a step forward when other peoples are hesitating. And these little differences, make all the difference. Hello there. Salim Omar here from the Straight Talk by Small Business Success Podcast. I have another amazing guest with us. His name is Glenn Fulls. Glenn, welcome. Thanks, Salim. Happy to be here. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here. Oh, it's my pleasure.
[00:01:00] Glenn is the co-founder, vice president and general manager, manager of Gap Wireless Inc. A leading product and service distributor for the mobile broadband and wireless markets. With over three decades of experience in sales, he has spent thousands of hours in the field or on the phone with customers and working with salespeople to help create Several very successful companies.
Glenn, I can wait for this. Let's start off with you sharing a little bit about your backstory. Sure, no problem. , believe it or not, before I started in business, I was, I worked for the federal government. I was a civil servant. , I went to school for electronics. I got recruited by the federal government in the weather service environment, Canada. I'm in Canada. And they sent me some. For more training. And then they sent me up to the Arctic to work on a weather station. And, I was fixing electronics and working on doing weather observations for them. And it
[00:02:00] was quite an interesting job at 21 years of age. You know, but the isolation was not much fun. I transferred to their head office in Toronto and my boss at the government said that I was in the wrong fields, said I needed to go into sales. Right. And. So I you know, I went into sales. I applied for a job. I got the job there. There's some funny stories there if we have time. And I worked for our sales company for five years and, I approached them about a business idea that I had, to start a business.
To go after this newfangled technology. The president of that company said, oh, you know, you can write your plan, show it to me, but I'm gonna probably show you how it's not gonna work. And so the next day I I ended up resigning and took my plan with me. And, new fle technology was the was the cell phone.
And of course we know the cell phone never went anywhere. Right. And so, I've been working in the wireless industry since then. We now call it mobile broadband and wireless. And I started a company, ran it for 15 years and sold it.
[00:03:00] And then I started another company, and I ran it for another 50 years, from 2007 until 2022.
And I sold this business, to a private equity firm, in February. And I agreed to stay home with them for, a few years helping them grow the business. And then hopefully at that point I'll you know, fade off into the sunset and retire or some such thing. Right. So that, that's the quickest, shortest version.
Yeah. Happy to go into any detail you want and yeah. Yeah. What would you attribute if there was one skill, one thing. Glen that you did in creating two multimillion dollar companies, what was that one skill? It always boils down to the same thing. And it's the separating factor from, A series of successes and non successs.
Mm-hmm. I don't wanna say failure because the difference is, is taking action in the face of fear, danger, uncertainty, , or
[00:04:00] any other misgiving that you might have. And regardless. I've said misgivings, fears or whatever, just driving through and making a decision and taking an action. When the the owner of that first company said he wasn't interested in my plan, I literally quit my job.
I'd only even married. Six days at the time, went home to the wife and said, oh, by the way, honey, I quit. And wow. Yeah. And then I sold the business 15 years later. There was a lot of problems that went with the with the new owners which had cause me to leave and, and start a new business.
And again, there was a lot of fear, a lot of uncertainty, and I had to take action, throughout the 2007 to 2022. There were very, a lot of market conditions and changing, forces, in my industry. And again, a lot of uncertainty and what helps you to continue on is to con, just drive through and continue to try to show leadership and mm-hmm make decisions in the face of danger and uncertainty.
[00:05:00] Yeah. And the way you say that, you know, uncertainty, that's just the way it is when we run a business. There is a lot of that. There's ups and downs and various things that, that happened. Yeah. Despite that, you mentioned that one skill is being decisive and taking action.
Exactly. Yeah. Got it. It really is. Yeah. Yeah. you can't know it all, right? You need people to help you and whatever. So it's not gonna be knowing at all. Cause you never will. Right. And there's always someone smarter than you. But the difference is, a lot of people, I like say it can be full of a lot of hot air.
But you know, the, the real people that make a difference are the ones that take action. You know? Mm-hmm. And they put their money where their mouth is. They take a step forward when other peoples are hesitating. And these little differences, make all the difference. And as I explained to a salesman a while back, he was asking about how he got ahead, when he was comparing himself to other people.
And, he was saying like, oh, how am I going to get, you
[00:06:00] know, to be that much better? And I said, you, you really don't need to be that much better than him. You only need to be like one millimeter better. Right. Like the difference between the winner and second place in a Olympic race is like a hair.
Yeah. Right but the, that difference is the difference between the winner and second and third and fourth place. Right. And yeah. And so you should always be striving to be better, be cognizant of those, what people are doing around you and not being like sitting on your laurels ex saying, oh, well, we're successful now, so we'll be successful tomorrow.
Right. You know, I, I love that saying just because I'm paranoid. It doesn't mean they're not after me. Right. And yeah, yeah. So I'm constantly evaluating the business, the markets we're in, our approach, everything, pricing terms, the whole nine yards, just to make sure that we are, we stay competitive and we are not sitting around thinking that we, you know, we figured it out a few years ago and that that'll still work today.
[00:07:00] Right. Mm. How important is it for a, for a small business owner to to master sales? Well, it nothing happens in a business until you sell something. And so oftentimes a lot of people, over the years or whatever, people come to me, oh, I have this great idea, this widget, this service, this software, this, whatever.
And I'm like, okay, well, who's going to buy it? oh no, but it's the greatest, fastest, deepest, cheapest, widest, best. I know, I'm sure it is. I'm sure you're capable of, you know, or you know I can get this great product from a different country and it's they don't sell it in North America or in whatever market.
And I'm like, great, who's going to buy it? Where's your customer and oftentimes, oh no, I know. I'll get customers. I say start with the customers. Start with the sale. Everything happens after you've made your first sale. Hmm hmm. Right. How important is marketing? You know, does marketing
[00:08:00] set the stage to make a sale?
Well, so whenever someone says marketing, then I always immediately reply with a little, speech, right? Which is don't confuse marketing with sales, right? And people are like, what do you mean? What do you mean? Right? And they obviously, oh, sales and marketing and or they'll hire a guy and they'll say, Hey, let's hire a director of sales and marketing.
And I'm like, well, what do they know about sales or marketing? Oftentimes they know marketing but not sales, or they know sales are not marketing. Mm-hmm. They're two distinctly different disciplines and the thought of having one person. It's, you know, I guess maybe at some point there might be a VP of sales and marketing, but without.
Experts in marketing and experts in sales, it, you won't be successful. Right? So the way, the best way for a small business owner to understand the difference is, is this little story I tell, which is, when your salesperson is in front of your customer, selling your product, whether he is on the phone or whether it's done through some kind of a
[00:09:00] direct virtual manner, or whether you're literally, in his business, you know, knocking on his door, calling on him, or whatever, when you're face-to-face doing that, that is selling.
Everything else is marketing. Mm-hmm. Right? So all this lead generation going on LinkedIn prospecting mm-hmm. All of that is marketing. And oftentimes I'm, I prefer to have our people separate. The marketing team develops the sales leads, the sales people have to follow them up. And one is accountable to the other.
I don't have any leads. Mark. It's marketing's fault. I've generated all these leads. There's no business. It's sales people's fault. And so that's the way I always think about marketing. They're both vital. If you don't have any sales leads, you know, or any inbound or, then your salespeople have nothing to do.
Right. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. What are some mistakes that you see salespeople make when they're in front of a prospect, physically
[00:10:00] or virtually? So, yeah, I mean, I could probably write a book on that, right? And you did. And you did. And what's the name of the book? The name of the book is Never Sit in the Lobby.
Yeah. And it's one of 57 techniques for, building a business and growing a career in selling. Right. It's filled with a lifetime of stories and, uh mm-hmm. You know, in a lot of cases things you do not wanna repeat, right. As well as things that you do wanna repeat. So I go over many, many things that a salesman should do.
When they're visiting customers and things that they shouldn't do. Right. one common mistake that people make is and I tried to give these funny little titles to each, little chapter so that it would stick in your mind later and you could, yeah. You could share the idea with people just by naming the title, because it would, it would tell the whole story.
And so one of them is called implied Familiarity, also breeds contempt. And so, I don't know, you may
[00:11:00] have heard the saying that we have. Familiarity breeds contempt, right? Yes. so I made up a saying called implied familiarity also breeds contempt. And what I mean by that is I tell a story where, going in a a, a customer's office, and sitting down and noticing that he had a photo behind him holding a fish with another man, right?
And I'm like, oh, wow. You're bass fishing. That, that's amazing. Like I'm, I love fishing, you know, maybe we could go fishing sometime. And the guy looks behind and says, oh my God. He goes, that's my ex father-in-law. I'm actually divorced from that woman. And I actually hate fishing.
And I had forgotten that photo was there. Right. And thank you for reminding me. It takes it and throws the photo in the garbage. Right, right, right. And I mean, it's me assuming that I know about this guy and that he's a fisherman. Right. I should have worked into the conversation. Oh,
[00:12:00] what do you do on the weekends?
I know, I noticed there's a photo of fishing. Are you an avid fisherman? Mm-hmm. And he, and then he would say, well, no, God no. I'm not a fisherman. And throw the photo. You know? right. And oftentimes when you're the recipient, when you're the customer, yeah, yeah. There's many times where they do that, right?
Yeah. And they say, oh, I see. It's misfiring. It's misfiring, isn't it? Yeah. I see that you drive this. I see that you do that. And they make all these assumptions about you, you know? And And it's annoying. It's annoying. It, it's annoying for the, yeah. For the receiver. Yeah. And I mean, they don't even need to get halfway through their little pitch, and you're already annoyed and you have to listen to the second half, right?
Mm-hmm. So, got it. So that's one mistake that I always try to tell people. You know, I always tell 'em, God gave you two ears and one mouth. Do the math. Right. You should be listening twice as much as you're talking. and if you've talked for more than a sentence or two Yeah. You probably need to shut up and uh Mm.
And ask another question.
[00:13:00] Right? you know, because you're, you're there trying to engage the customer and get the customer talking, right? A lot of salespeople, they think they, that they're a circus performer where they need to be going in and doing a song and dance, right? And, oh, this is the greatest product.
And it's, you know, and it's big and it's fast, and it's wide and it's cheap, and it's 20% deeper than the competitor. And, I have a, giveaway on my website called The Punch Perfect Pitch and Close. And basically it's a technique that I developed to explain to people how to do the perfect presentation, right where you.
You punch them with something that'll alter their state, right? You don't literally punch them, of course, and so it's the very first part of your presentation. So, you might start it, turn the lights down, and then start a video that brings out a motion and the customer that gets them engaged.
Right? And you know, the sounds, the vision, the. The music, you know? Mm-hmm. You think of a car on a winding road , in the mountains of California. Not that I sell cars, but you know, just to in
[00:14:00] your mind, kind of come up with a thing. it could be a pr a robot that works in production and, speeds up the process by, 400%.
Or it could be Any kind of machine or software or whatever, just some kind of video or maybe you just make a sound or you maybe you just, play a testimonial. You know, since we engage with Glennon Sons, our productivity has been enhanced by 20%. And, something to change their state and get them engaged.
That's the punch. Mm. Then, then there's the perfect pitch, which is I, which I use the Goldilocks principle, which is, you know, they have, you know, mild, medium, hot, good, better, best, so I always limit it to three points. Tell them what I'm gonna tell them. Three things I focus on during the presentation, go over those three things.
Then at the end, I review those three things. That's the perfect pitch. And. Then I move to the close, and when people say, how do you close a customer? I always explain that when you've done a profit punch and perfect pitch. You aren't the one closing,
[00:15:00] it's the customer. The customer's saying like, how do I get this?
How do I get a trial? what's the price? What, how do we move to the next step? When they're asking you those questions, that's the best thing. If you're hefting to pressure and, move a customer to closing, you probably didn't engage them enough. Right? You know, and most of the time if you're talking to them about a product or service or whatever, they're probably gonna buy that from someone.
So if they're not clamoring to buy yours, they're probably interested in someone else, and you need to figure out what, what's missing on your end. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Too often when I'm having conversations with a business owner and they have a sales issue, you know, when we have this conversation about what their sales process is, It's getting too quickly to the sale, to trying to close them without.
Doing the precursory work, the questions, the engagement. Exactly. Before they get to that, they're too anxious to talk about their
[00:16:00] product or their service Exactly. And how it's gonna solve their problems. Yeah. That's usually from a lack of preparation and maturity and, you need to understand that you have value.
You have every right to be inquiring about the customer's needs and why they're there taking up your time. It's not just all, all about the customer. Obviously you're focused on the customer, but you know, your job is to try to get outta them what it is they need and why they need it, and then start marrying your product to those specific.
Requirements. Right. I mean it's like trying to, sell a four-wheel drive, vehicle to a customer that drives on flat roads and the then, and the weather never changes, right? I mean, that's probably not the feature that's gonna sell them. Right. You know what I mean? It might, that may not be the customer.
Right, exactly. So that, that's what the sales process is, is to see if there's the right fit, if Yeah. Exactly. What we are offering is, you know Right. For, for the client. For the customer in front of us. That's right. For the prospective customer. one of the questions that I often get
[00:17:00] when I'm talking to business owners is, They're the salesperson, right?
They created the organization. They're really good at sales. Because the, they know the product, they know the service. They're passionate about the business. They wanna grow it so that energy and enthusiasm shores through and they're able to sell and grow their business up until a certain point.
What is that point? When should they start then looking, you know, start looking to hire bring in a salesperson or develop a sales team? Well, that's actually a really good question and I find most entrepreneurs really wanna be involved in everything, right? and so my answer would be, I would always hire the next person the moment I can, like capably, gainfully, employ them and keep them paid, right?
The best person to hire first is a salesperson. And the reason why is because the salesman is free. And everyone's like, what do you mean a salesman is free?
[00:18:00] And I say, well, A crappy salesman will cost you a lot of money, right? Mm-hmm. Because you have to pay them and they don't do anything, right?
Mm-hmm. But a good salesperson pays for themself and everyone else in the building. So the faster you hire a salesman that's capable and productive and generating, you know, the quota that's been assigned, they're actually throwing off revenue that pays for themself. Or go they're free. Doesn't cost you anything.
It comes from the revenue of the products that they're selling for you. And two, if they're really good, they're throwing off enough revenue that now you can hire a bookkeeper as well. You can then you know that now you don't have to worry about the accounting. Then you realize, hey, the website and the social media's taking up too much time.
You can hire a marketing communications person. And again, then may another salesperson. And so my attitude is always to hire the people as fast as possible, but not, not to build a, false, company that, that doesn't warrant it. Right? Like, if you don't have any business at all, then
[00:19:00] clearly you're a one man show and you need to go out and generate some revenue, establish that your product or your service is viable, minimum viable product, what have you.
Mm-hmm. You know? And then the moment you know that You've got something. should try to hire people to be replicating that success because you can only be in so many places at one time, right? You're gonna have to talk to the bank, get financing, make sure your legal things are up to date, your marketing's up to date.
You have to motivate the staff. You have to build a structure, nowadays you need to follow, you know, environmental, social and governance issues. Diversity and equality issues. You need people and staff to do that. Right? Right. So, I always say that, everyone's like, well, how do you handle so many things?
As the general manager, you're juggling so many issues. And I said, well, when I'm doing my job perfectly, I don't actually have to do anything. Like my job is the conductor. At the front of the orchestra. I'm not playing the violin, I'm not playing the piano, I'm not playing the, trombone or the French horn or anything like that.
[00:20:00] I'm actually orchestrating you know, the music or what have you. And really I'm not doing anything. But I'm leading everyone. I make the final decisions and I direct the general direction of the business and the staff on what they should be doing next. Right? A lot of people confuse, doing with leading, and that's the biggest mistake that a small business person can make.
Oh, I didn't do enough. I didn't do this and I didn't do that, or whatever, but, Your real job as the boss. Is to make decisions and to be a leader. That's it, right? And, people if you lead them, they will follow. And all they really need you to do is help them to make a decision or to make the final decision for them.
Because most people will avoid making these choices. They'll push it down the road And that's really what separates the leader from everyone else. Yeah. Yeah. This is great stuff. Glenn. Really appreciate all the insights you've shared
[00:21:00] with us. I, I'm looking at the clock and we are now at the tail end of okay.
Of this episode. of questions. , what's the best way for folks to reach out to you and more importantly, get their hands on your new book. Tell us. Yeah, tell us about that. Yeah. So, well I have a website. It's just my full name. Glenn Poulos.com GlennPoulos.com. And that links to all my social media.
I'm super active on LinkedIn and Twitter. you know, I post some lifestyle stuff on Instagram and Facebook. You can contact me on any one of those platforms and I will respond to you and there's links to all of the bookstores and places you can buy books on my website.
But, for most people, that's just as simply as going to Amazon and typing. Never sit in the lobby and it will come right up. The nice thing about the book, you don't have to read it all in one sitting in order to make it make sense. You can pick it up at any point and flip to any chapter and you're gonna learn a lesson that you can put
[00:22:00] to work that day in your business. Put it down, pick it up. A week later, learn something new. Go back to a chapter. And when you, you say to your salesperson, like, why haven't you visited Jack over at Acme solutions, lately? And they're like, oh, I just don't know what to do, or I don't know what we can, you know, and then you'll immediately say to them, Go refer to the chapter, show up with something in your hand and something in your mind. And Hmm. And I mean, so the book's very, very handy for figuring out these little tricks in order to, how to engage a customer, get back to a customer. What do you do when you're stuck? What do you say on the phone? How to leave a voicemail. How to send an email. There's a million, not a million, but there's tons of of little tips and tricks in there that people use every day. and I love it when I hear my staff talking to each other and they're quoting the book. Yeah. And I know it's made an impact when I hear things like that, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, great. And I highly encourage folks to, to get your copy of the book. And the simple reason is
[00:23:00] because you've shared some great insights here. The book is 30 years of your experience. in the field and creating exactly two successful multimillion dollar organizations. So yeah. Getting three nuggets, five nuggets from this book Yeah. Is all one needs. Yeah. This year, the company's probably gonna break a hundred million, so it's grown from very small. In 2007 we were at 2 million, and this year we'll probably do a hundred million, so That's awesome. Yeah. Glen, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate you taking the time out. Yeah. And sharing all the wisdom you did. Yeah. Thank you.