1537 – How to be a Pleasure to do Business With Always with Gap Wireless’ Glenn Poulos

0:28Hey there, thoughtful listener. million in revenue. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you.

0:58with us right now it's glenn pulis glenn you are the author of the book never sit in the lobby we're going to be talking about that you also are the co-founder of gap wireless and had a very successful exit and now you've been brought back on you're serving as the uh kind of the vice president, general manager, and you also do limited engagements for sales consulting and speaking. Glenn, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks, Josh. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. You bet. You bet. Yeah. So, well, I kind of gave a thumbnail sketch of where you are today, but would you mind kind of talk about like your impact that you have in the world today, especially when did the book launch?

1:41Book launched in February, 2022. It was the same week the timing, I did not do this on purpose, but the timing of the book launch, which was a delayed a little bit for one reason or another. And the, uh, the signing of the sale of my company, uh, after 15 years in business was the same week. And it was, you know, very much a toss up on, uh, you know, getting the job done, selling the business and getting the book promoted. So some of the, some of the, uh, you know, the, the book launch things had to take a little bit of a back seat for the first few days into that first week. And, you know, I didn't want them wondering which who they bought, which company they bought when the owner disappears, you know, to go on a book tour, right.

2:20So yeah, that was last February. And yeah, and I've stayed on, I rolled in some of the equity into the business. It's a private equity firm. And I've stayed on to manage their Canadian operation, which is, you know, it's, you know, well over 130 million dollar type business, over 100 people and managing that infrastructure for them in Canada now. Yeah. Well, so I'm so excited to kind of hear kind of what your main, I would say your tent poles are when it comes to how sales gets done today. Awesome. I love talking about sales. Yeah. And there's so many different ways sort of sales to happen. And, you know, the sales that resonate the most with me are the ones I grew up in, which is sort of selling of high ticket items.

3:12For me, it's mainly high tech, high ticket items. You know, we're in wireless telecom and more on the face to face basis. And I don't mean encyclopedias, you know, knocking door to door. But I'm talking our products don't get sold over the Internet. They're not SaaS products, you know, with a free trial download 30 day, you know, that kind of a thing where the whole thing can actually be executed online. Ours, you need to get in front of the customer. You need to meet your clients. You need to have your products trialed and approved, either engineers or different parts of the technology stack and businesses are approving these products for going in their network or using to test their networks and things like that.

3:57And so where my experience lies and my, you know, sort of the techniques I like to talk about are getting, staying and acting in front of customers, right? How do you get there? What do you do when you get there? How do you stay there? And, you know, one of the tenets of the Business Gap Wireless that I built starting in 2007 was how to be a pleasure to do business with always. And that really is the cornerstone, excuse me, of our success and the core values. It's sort of an inner core value of the business. It's not a public facing core value. And yeah, and so I go off on many angles in the book that you referenced on how I do that.

4:39And, you know, and people now, especially coming out of the pandemic where they were stuck on Zoom for like two years, especially in Canada, we had a really long, long drawn out period where the businesses were not entertaining each other coming to their locations, right? Yeah, oof. I can't imagine. Yeah, I had to, yeah, I literally had to like install the, I had to get new chairs for all the salespeople and all the nails on the chairs are pointing up now. And so that, you know, when they sit down, right, you know, to keep get the salesman out of their chairs and back in front of customers. And it was a challenge, you know, sort of psychologically for them to, you know, break that habit of sort of working from home for literally five days a week and getting back in front of customers, right?

5:23And they're like, what do I do? How do I get there? What do I, you know, because they hadn't done it for, you know, even though that was their job, you know, two years before. And, and so, you know, one of my, one of my sort of famous lines from the book is just show up with something in your hand and something in your mind. And, you know, and but yeah, so we've had to make the tradition transition back to getting in front of our customers and getting them engaged with the products and services that we sell. And yeah, I wouldn't say that it's been an easy run by any stretch of the imagination.

5:58information um but that's sort of the cornerstone of what i'm promoting when i when i uh mentioned some of my other 57 tips that i like to share right yeah yeah um aside from just the impact obviously that the pandemic had on you know those who are involved in uh and again i i you know i love you know b2b sales is just it's my passion um and and i'm curious about your take on just how consumer, like if we think of everybody being a consumer and like how we buy, how have our brains been altered over the past maybe five to eight years in a way that, you know, every sales professional needs to maybe set the Tom Hopkins book on a shelf or like advice, you know, of old and say, yeah, I wouldn't do that so much anymore today.

6:52Here's what I would focus on instead. Right. So for me, and yeah, I've often have some lively conversation on LinkedIn with sales trainers and other people when I'm sharing some of my, you know, my concepts in the daily kind of postings, right? And so for me, it's kind of a blending of the two old and new, right? And so, because a lot of people, you know, they got a nice comfy chair in March 2020, and they fired up, they got the, you know, the higher end licenses for LinkedIn. and they said, wow, I've never been so comfortable. They fired up a, you know, a pro license of Zoom or, you know, GoToMeeting or something like that.

7:31And they figured, look, this is the new way of doing business, right? But what I've realized about the customers that we deal with was, like, that was a force, that was forced on them, that was forced on us. So what I found our customers are doing now is they're doing a lot of their upfront work electronically before they talk to you and before you have a chance to engage with you, but it can't be done completely that way. So in other words, you know, using a car, a car is an easy analogy, but this carries over to the high-tech items we sell. You know, somebody is going to go online and they're going to research, you know, the, whether it's, you know, Ford, GM, Chrysler, or, you know, Honda, you know, Toyota, Nissan, or Mercedes, BMW, Audi, or whatever.

8:15They're going to be researching those brands, are going to be going to these websites and, you know, your, your social media, your, your websites, they need to be on point, right? The data needs to be there. The, everything about your, your social presence and your online presence needs to scream, you know, I'm the right product for you to buy, but there's a point, a dividing point, right? Where especially using a car as an example, where it quickly jumps from the online world to the real world, right? Like maybe he's like, oh, you know i'm i'm i'm looking at mercedes or audi and uh bmw but maybe he he uh removes the bmw from the list and then he goes to test drive the audi and the mercedes you can't do that online you cannot it doesn't matter how many youtube videos you watch you need to sit in those cars to really um you know uh gain a perspective on what they are and so that's that's where the a lot of people make a mistake nowadays.

9:14They think they can skip the test drive. And so, and so I'm saying like, you need your, you need your, your electronic footprint on point, but if you're just a sales guy, right. That's not your job. Right. So I find that a lot of sales guys, they can, and girls, of course, right. Confuse marketing with selling, right. Oh, I spend two hours on LinkedIn every day doing this and whatever. And I'm like, that's fine. And you can do that. And I recommend you do spend time, you know, garnering contacts and what have using those types of tools, but that's not actually selling. That's actually marketing, right?

9:51You're sort of obtaining and massaging what would be called a lead, right? Right. A lead in some way. That's, that's marketing. That's not selling. Right. And so, but what they're thinking, you know, and I say to them, Hey, what have you been doing? Oh yeah. I've been doing some prospecting. And what does that look like? And Oh, you know, I've been on LinkedIn and I upgraded to premier, you know, the professional license. I'm like, okay, carry on what else and at nowhere in the point does the sound of his car engine starting, you know, come into the discussion where he's getting in the car and driving to the customer.

10:22Yeah. And, you know, and and so much of what I preach is like when it's only when you're at the customer that you're going to realize that your competitor's product is actually sitting on the on all the benches in their lab. Or, you know, you know, I like to use the example of tow motors. I don't know why, but, you know, these are$100 ,000, you know, items in the warehouse, right? So, you know,$100 ,000 forklift or tow motor doesn't get bought in a factory unless the CEO signing off on it, most likely, right? Maybe they rent them or what have you. And I so I use the I use those as examples of if you want that business, you know, you can't just expect them to download a data sheet off your website and place an order for 100k.

11:05No. Right. And so that's where I try to marry the old and new. And if you check our, you know, our website, you know, you will find that if you compare it to our competitors, we outshine them in almost every respect. In some cases, because we sell products from around the world, we find high-tech items that are made in, you know, Australia, Singapore, you know, all places in the Far East, you know, Sweden, Finland, and we bring them to North America. And we have a sales team in North America that sells them to our customer base, right? And so that's the basis of our business. And the, you know, I actually forgot my main point, but the, you know, the value of these products is in us presenting them to the customers, right?

11:55And, you know, and that's our, you know, our sustainable competitive advantage is getting those products in front of our customers over the other products from Finland and Sweden and Australia that our competitors are not doing it, right? And oftentimes, yeah, sorry, now I remember what I was going to say was that if you Google the vendors that we sell, we're just the distributor for them. But in Google, we often rank higher than the manufacturer, which is very uncommon because we spend a lot of time on SEO, a lot of time on AdSense, Google Ads and all that. But our sales team isn't doing that.

12:32It's my marketing team. Yes, right, right. Right, right. They need to be there to, you know, listen to the needs and, you know, have the empathy and like solve problems and, you know, or again, you know, be very customer focused. That's my own bias there. You know, so someone, Glenn, let's say someone that's come across this podcast conversation and they're interested in, okay, Glenn, I'm going to get the book. And again, the book is called Never Sit in the Lobby. um well let me just have you just mention that so that you can buy right now um your website is glen ulus.com p-o-u-l-o-s.com and uh you could buy the book there it's on amazon um again it's called never sit in the lobby what is the transformation that happens when someone reads the book and and implements what you teach yeah so the greatest thing about is about the book of course I wrote the book, so I'm impartial.

13:32You're okay to be biased. But is that you don't actually have to read it all at once. You can flip to any chapter at any time and relearn, you know, that little snippet and they all stand alone. Right. And so there's, they're broken down into little sections, you know you know, showing up at the customer. That's where the never sit in the lobby came from. You know don't be sitting down on your phone, looking at Facebook or texting your wife, right. Be, be standing at attention, waiting for the guy to come through the door. And when that person walks through the door, shake their hand and get ready to move to the next steps.

14:03Right. Yeah. And, um, you know, one of the other rules that follows that is always ask for a mini tour. Right. And people are like, why a mini tour? What's a mini tour. And I go, well, who likes going on tours, right? Tours are like three, four hours long by the end of it. You're, you know, you know, and you got to get on and off a bus and you got to listen to a guy for four hours. I go, a mini tour is the guy takes you to his new lab, his new warehouse, his offices, it gives you a little tour of what he's doing. That's where you see that, Hey, you know, the jacket on the back of his chair has your competitor's logo on it.

14:33And the other competitors, you know, got units on trial and things like that. Right. And, and there's other parts on rapport, you know, and lots of things on active listening and skills, telephone skills, skills you know prospecting skills things like that right and you know and and so oftentimes you can just flip to that kind of section to pick up some pointers and remind me hey i'm going to see customers i'm on you know i'm on a sales trip for two weeks or whatever i want to brush up on this just so i can give myself that added boost of confidence on what do i do to get act and stay in front of the customer and and to be a pleasure to do business with always right and um and that's that's really what you get out of the book.

15:17And, and you know, you don't have to go through the 250 pages to get the value, you're getting the value after the first two pages. And then four pages later, there's another lesson that you've learned and and what have you, right? So yeah. And then of course, someone Glenn this list or a conversation, and they're like, wow, can we hire you? How does that work? Well, you can just reach out to me on LinkedIn or on the website. And I'd be happy to engage with you. I do work with lots of companies, especially at the management level, helping them break down, I don't want to say biases, but they get stuck in a rut and they need a new way of looking at things, especially the sales team, the marketing team, sales compensation, structure of the business, leadership, how the leadership is structured and managed.

16:08and I bring a new perspective to them on that to help them to break down some habits that have maybe formed or what have you and then try to set them on their way with some of these new tools, right? And I'm quite easy to get ahold of on LinkedIn and happy to work with businesses anywhere in North America. Yeah, awesome. Your website again is glennpoolis.com, G-L-E-N-N-E-O-U-L-O-S. when somebody goes there, what should they click on? What should they do? Well, they can download a few of the articles that are interesting as well, sort of bonus articles that didn't go in the book. And they can just contact me in a little form there, fill it out and reach me.

16:51And they can reach me directly on LinkedIn as well. So, yeah, excellent. All right. Again, Glenn Poulos, your website, glennpoulos.com. And again, the book, Never Sit in the Lobby. It's on Amazon and everywhere else. Glenn, great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Josh. Thank you so much for having me.

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