 Hey guys, I'd like to introduce you to Jeff Bounds. Jeff Bounds is a strategic advisor and executive coach. He worked with Grant Cardone and helped him promote and grow his sales training products for over a year. He's responsible for more than 25 million dollars in sales and is currently working as a consultant and coach. He's going to discuss with us business accountability and how to basically build great foundations for your business development and also some of his experience working with the Grant Cardone and his new path as a business consultant. So Jeff, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, absolutely, Robbie. I'm super happy to be on it this morning. Yeah, awesome. Awesome. So I'd like to start off with a very basic question, the one that probably everybody in the team and everybody watching right now wants to know is how's your experience working with Grant and his team? Because everybody here is like, is a huge fan. Basically, we're all like 10x fans, basically. Yeah, man. The 10x movement is real. Obviously, there's people all over the world that have joined that movement and Grant has done a fantastic job of really being able to reach a wide audience and help a lot of people open their mind and realize that you can get whatever you want to have in life. It's just you got to commit to it and you got to realize that it's going to take 10 times more effort, 10 times bigger think to actually get where you want to go in life. So great experience and I really enjoyed the time that I had spent there at 10x headquarters in Miami. Right. Awesome. And I know that for you, your role was kind of a unique one, right? Because you also focused a lot on helping salespeople become a lot more accountable with the way that they do sales training because this is basically a digital platform. Yeah, absolutely. So really kind of how the whole thing started was the president over there, Jared Glanton and I had met about six years ago and we had been doing this dance for quite some time about me actually coming down and bringing some value to the team down there. So I actually went down there October of last year and started on a project to really help Grant and the team be able to expand out their offering in the sales training space. And the reality about that is training traditionally has only been done two different ways. It's either been done in a video format or it's been done in like onsite workshops. And the reality is on both of those strategies, the video and the onsite, both of them kind of have holes. So what I was able to bring down there to them is a concept that really has helped change the game for them. And it's something that we constantly see every single day now continuing to evolve is coaching. And coaching is essentially like the peanut butter to the jelly, right? It's going to tie everything together and really make sure that whatever audience you're working with is going to get the most value out of the program and it's been a tremendous success. And how do you actually implement coaching into the sales training? Yeah, for sure. So really, when you look at a training methodology and you got to look at the end audience, you know, some people are visual learners, some people are auditory and some people are kinesthetic. But the reality is, you know, through our lives, we've been preconditioned to, since parochial school, to memorize what we needed for the test, to memorize what we need to pass the final exam and things of that sort. So people really have been directed towards what to learn. So the problem is when you get out of school, you get out of college or whatever, you get thrown into the world, you don't have that guidance anymore. So listen, we have YouTube, which I think this is going to be broadcasted on today, which is, you know, obviously the second biggest search engine in the world. And literally, you could probably spend your entire lifetime watching videos to really learn whatever you want to find out the actual impact of in your life. But the problem is learning and then doing it are two totally different things. I mean, one of the biggest things that I think most people face in life is the knowing and the doing gap. Everybody knows what to do, people absorb information, but they don't know how actually to apply it in their life to actually get the end result, which is what everybody would want. And it's called transformation. And you've discovered a better way to do this than what most people currently do? Yeah, I mean, look, it's been an interesting journey. Just like I tell everybody else, I mean, you know, what you see below the tip of the iceberg is really the catalyst for success and everything in life. I mean, it's just like people look at Grant right now. I mean, there's a lot of haters on Grant. I mean, look, Grant, Grant had made it happen. Grant had been out there putting the blood, sweat, the tears. I think, you know, Grant had actually traveled on this 365 days of the year to actually get his business started going door to door, knocking on doors. You know, when nobody knew who was, but people see the jet today, they see the lifestyle, and they see everything else and they want what he has. But then the other side of the coin, they're not really willing to put in the work to get it. So from my perspective, Grant was one of my first mentors when I started off in sales back in the 90s. And I started off my sales career in the automotive industry, and he was the first person that I guess I really resonated with. So he was kind of the foundation of my journey in sales and personal development. But what I've learned over the years, and I've invested 26 years in the obsession and the passion on, you can see behind me here, I'm a big lifelong learner. I read my study, I invest a lot of money, myself and personal development. I have discussed essentially the solution, the simplified solution to success, so to say, of how to take an individual that really doesn't know what direction they want to go in and guide them to a pathway, a game plan of how to get the foundational aspects to start to develop it and then teach them the two components that are essential to taking their life to the next level. And I'd love to share this with you. Nice. Yeah, perfect. I'd love to hear that. I mean, as a business owner, I'm at a different kind of intersection. And a lot of our clients are kind of facing the same situation where, at the beginning, you need that coaching, you need somebody who's going to help you implement so you can start getting results and getting traction in your business. Most of the people that are listening, I think like 60% of them, have already been, got into a point where their business is established and I'm in that same location myself, where there's already a few dozen employees and things are already moving. But now I'm noticing that the coaching aspect got in through the back door where at the beginning, you're just motivated to do everything because it's, you know, if you don't do it, it's not going to happen. And that's very good. But then once you get to a point where it grew a bit, now you have a team and now it's kind of hard to find that motivation again. So it's kind of like you have to re-implement the same, the same kind of style of coaching, the same foundational principles, but it's happening all over again on a different level. So I'm definitely very much interested in learning more about what kind of methodologies you're using and what kind of principles. Yeah. Well, you said a lot of really impactful things there. So I want to unpack those a little bit. So first and foremost, leadership is everything, right? Leadership today is one of the biggest aspects of business that's falling short because mid-level management side of organizations is not reaching the bar on what it takes to drive success. And yeah, you alluded to it, the onslaught of coaching. Well, the problem is most people in an organization are labeled as managers or positional leaders. But the problem is they don't know how to guide, they don't know how to coach, they don't know how to mentor their people. But first and foremost, make them feel like they're part of something and create for them a vision for the future on how they can be a leader today in their current role and to coach them through the process and realize that in the beginning, no one is a born leader. It's something that's developed. So coaching has become so important because, you know, companies contact me all the time, individuals contact me all the time, whether they're executives, whether they're in the sales role, whether they're in operations or whatever. And they say, hey, Jeff, I'm stuck because COVID hit. Literally, it was like the litmus test. And it was like the smack in the face for so many organizations to realize, oh my God, for so long, the economy has been thriving. And now all of a sudden we got a pivot, but we're pivoting into a space that we don't understand. They're pivoting into a space now of a remote workplace. They're pivoting into a space of now massive accountability and they're pivoting into a space of not hitting their forecast, not being able to grow their pipelines because their people don't know how to take full responsibility as a leadership, you know, individual inside the organization and be able to expand and grow because they're not getting the guidance. So perfect example, just working with a company. They had like 250 employees, they got a sales team of 50. BPS sales, he can barely breathe. When's the last time they've been mentored, maybe by regional sales director, maybe once a year at a company-wide sales meeting. Again, going back to the training methodology, two days deep dive training. And they think, oh, that's the ticket. That's what everybody's going to get. Here's a copy of the PowerPoint. Go out there and kill it, man. And I hope you're going to hit the forecast. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. First and foremost, today, more than any other time, people's attention span is less than that of a goldfish. Just think about it, man. You want to order something on Amazon? You click one button, you get there. You get alerts and notifications on Instagram. The limit on Instagram videos is one minute. That is not by happenstance. That is not a mystery. It's because people won't pay attention. So how do you think people are going to pay attention being locked into a room for 16 hours over a day? It ain't going to happen. It's what are you going to do every single day after? What are you going to do to set a foundation in the baseline? And what are you going to do to set out a roadmap to be able to measure success? If there's one thing that I learned from Grant more than anything else, it's like you can't grow what you don't measure. And if you don't know where you are today and you can't look at the data and the metrics and the baselines to be able to see where you want to go and understand what it's going to take to get there, that's why most people and most companies remain bound. Right. So it starts with a lack of measurement because when you're not measuring, you're not aware of it. Totally. And then the reality is, I mean, sales is a simple game. People make it way too complicated. It's conversation. It's understanding that it's what's in it for the client, not you. What's in it for the client? And what do they truly want to accomplish? Everybody's been trained for years, feature benefit, feature benefit, sell the company. You get people that can recite off every instance of a strategy or a competitive advantage for a company. But if it doesn't matter to the end user, what's the point? And another thing is that people hear salespeople, but they don't listen. And the magic, which we'll start to talk about here as we move through this conversation today, is it's all in the conversation. It's all in the front half of the sale when 90% of the world focuses on one thing when they hear it's selling, closing the deal. Promise you can't close the deal if you never get past first base. Yeah. I mean, we've started our company in March, like during the beginning of COVID. And so the company is actually fully remote. And I've noticed personally how we'd have like an unproductive employee and they would just not be performing well. And then we'd have like, I'd have like one good coaching call with him where I, you know, you'd actually talk to them one on one and understand what their actual goals are. And suddenly their performance just shoots up for a few days. But then it starts going down again. And I would get frustrated. But I was not, I didn't think about it that like, it's like this amorphic, you know, you need to do better, you need to be more motivated, you need to move faster. But now I'm realizing like, okay, but you're not giving them clear KPIs that they need to actually push towards. Absolutely. I mean, and then, you know, and talking about sales specifically, you don't know where they're broken inside of the cycle. You don't know, like, I mean, there's companies out there today. I mean, another one, I guess, the biggest game changers in my career is when I had the experience of working around a private equity company. And really seeing behind the scenes, like, you know, these companies like McKenzie and companies like that really at a high level of how they scale forecasts and look at growth. But it's just simple things. I mean, companies out there today, maybe some of you that are watching this podcast, you're bringing on sales teams, whether it's either an inside sales team or outside sales team. Most of these people have never even developed how to understand and work in territory. Most of these people don't even understand a pipeline. Most of these people don't understand what it takes. They don't do the math, how many calls, how many demos, how many people in best case and how many people am I going to close to hit the numbers? And I can tell you now more than ever, it's like, if you have the focus on maybe taking your company public, if you have the focus on scaling your company to get additional investment dollars, you got a private equity company or angel investor, and you can't even tell them what you're forecasting, you're not going to be very successful. So it's the small things that are so easy. And then, you know, people always want to talk about, oh, it's the basics. The problem is most people don't even do the basics. And if you don't do the basics, then you can't get to the level. So there's levels in everything. Somebody can come and say, hey, I'm a great sales person, okay, relative to what? The interesting thing about life, and you always got to be careful who you get your information from. So for example, from my perspective, I've sold in the automotive industry, I've sold in the real estate industry, I've sold in the financial services industry, I've sold into the software industry, I've sold into the entertainment industry in Hollywood. So I know how to basically adapt and morph to help any organization turn the lever and go to the next level. Now, if I had only been in one space, I can't help you if I haven't done it. And I'm a believer that if you're going to go out there, you got to practice what you preach, it's got to work. But the one key common denominator is there's two secrets that no matter what you're doing in any organization any business are the catalysts for growth. But the problem is most people glaze over or in most companies, those two departments go like this. And what are those? So I have your full attention right now. So basically what those two things are are their marketing and psychology. If you want to be great in anything that you do, whether it's sales, scaling a company, growing your people, make sure you're leveraging your human capital, marketing and psychology. And let me explain why. Number one, you can't grow yourself if you don't know yourself. If you don't understand your learning modality, if you don't understand how you process information, first and foremost, how are you going to communicate with others that think in a different wavelength, right? You're always going to have this, right? Because you don't understand the psychology is everything behind success. We're human beings. You and I are connected at a higher source. But through life, we're preconditioned to have different beliefs and different thoughts. What you think is right and what I think is wrong doesn't matter because to you in your mind, that's your map of the world. Once you can understand that and once you can have conversations with people, the mystery, the gold, the Trojan horse to success in the sales process is in the fact find. It's asking questions. Anybody that knows me, anybody that's worked with me will be like, dude, that guy is stone cold when it comes to asking questions. I will ask questions 80% of the time and I'll talk 20% of the time. And nine times out of 10, people close themselves. If you have to hard close somebody, you're not a good sales person. And that's the cold hard truth because the hard close is transactional. If there's people on this call today that have a strategic sort of sales process or a consultative sort of sales process, dude, it's not going to work. You can't put training in a box. And one of the things that I will say that most influencers out there won't because they want to keep everything in their lane. You got to get that absorb as much information as possible. You got to absorb as much information as possible and then take it, put it in the parking lot and say, okay, great. How is that relative towards what I'm trying to do? Because if you take one avenue and I'm calling on a medical company dealing with the CEO of a medical company versus see dealing with a owner of a gutter company, a little bit of a different concept there, right? A little bit of a different conversation, a little bit of a different methodology. So there is no one sales process. There is no one way to do things. You just got to find out, what am I going into? How can I help them solve the problem? Then everybody has a problem. It's just what level is the problem? And then that comes through understanding, that comes through knowledge. And then that is what comes through coaching. So when I deal with people every single day, like if I'm working with somebody from a software company and I'm like, Hey, what are you doing today? What is your target audience? What is your hook? What is the biggest problem that your client is facing today? And if you got to go in as the expert, you got to go in, but before the engagement happens, you have to know what you're going to drop on them for them to say, man, this is a trusted advisor. This is somebody that's an expert in this space. This is somebody that's going to help me take my game to the next level. Most people don't do that. Most people, how fast can I talk, man? How can I tell them how great I am? How can I tell them how great my product? Well, it doesn't matter if you can't solve their problem. And it doesn't matter if you can't get somebody to make a decision. How does somebody make a decision? They make a decision in two ways. You know what those are? Get them to make a decision. Yeah. How does somebody make a decision? No, enlightening me on emotion and they justify it with logic. Right? Emotion is always going to win. Most things logically don't make sense. But if you can get somebody bought into the overall concept, and this is called future pace. Now I'm certified in neuro linguistic programming, which some people like, oh, that's like, woo, that's voodoo knowing what that is. That's a high level of psychology and understanding human beings. Right? And the reason people make a decision is not for the product, not for the solution, but for one reason and one reason only, how it's going to make them feel or what it's going to do to transition them to getting what they want in their life. So if you can implement that into a sales methodology, you'll have hockey stick growth, man. You'll be like this and all of a sudden it'll just explode because you're changing the game. But this doesn't happen overnight. I mean, it's like if you're a golfer and you picked up a set of golf clubs, you know, at, you know, their local sporting goods store and you went out to the golf course, you put the tee in the ground, you put the ball and you started whacking the ball. Yeah, you're going to eventually hit it. But then guess what? You're going to go take lessons and be like, man, I'm not on the same strategy. You're going to grip the club and be, this sounds very awkward to me. You're going to start to swing and you're either hitting the ground every time or you're cooking the ball into the woods and what do most people do? They go back to the old way because they can't break through change. The number one secret, the number one thing that keeps people suppressed in this world is the lack of knowledge and the lack of perseverance to break through the barriers to what's on the other side of success. Excellent, excellent. And what would you suggest to someone who basically manages a team of a few dozen people and imagine the company is entirely remote and you want people to change, you know, you want people to be focused, sharp. I mean, I've got team on, I've got some of my team on Grant Cardone's Cardone University and that's, that's been working really well. But then the problem is how do you like keep them accountable? How do you make sure that they actually take the training, implement it and, and you know, take, actually, like I said, break through the change that's needed. Yeah, well, number one is there's too many copies in the world. You got to be yourself and people by authenticity and people being genuine. So I can't be like you, you can't be like me. There's many people that try to like turn themselves into somebody else and it comes across as disingenuous and it comes across as like, you know, almost like a parody, right? You got to find what your strengths are and then you got to understand you got to become literally a master and mastery has been defined by a gentleman named and I'm going to give him the credit for it. I'm sure he wasn't the first because most information is repurposed, but the one, at least the one that stood out to me was a gentleman named Malcolm Gladwell that said to truly become a master, it takes 10,000 hours. Now, do the math. Yeah. Right. Do the math. So it's like, I have been investing myself into studying, understanding why people do what they do for a minimum of three hours a day for the past 26 years. Do the math. Most people don't even pick up a book. Most people don't even, you know, listen to an audio book. Most people say I don't have the time and that's why they remain average and that's why they're going to always say, well, it's just not meant for me. It's just maybe I'm not at that level. It's not there at that level because I'm a firm believer that every human being has the potential to do whatever they want to do. It's just, do they have the roadmap? Do they have the tactics and the strategies to use to get there? Are they willing to say consistent? So to spend back, for example, somebody wants to partner up and work with me. Number one, I got to find out where you are. Number two, I got to get a level of commitment that you do want to change because there's two sort of mindsets, right? There's a growth mindset. There's a fixed mindset. The problem is on the planet, most people have fixed mindsets. And the other major problem is you have people in leadership and in management that because of either self-image or because of the threat of being exposed, they don't want to bring in a consultant like me because I'm going to change the game. I'm going to spend things up and I'm going to get inside of their organization and find out what's the catalyst to change. Maybe they're comfortable. Maybe they don't want to get that deep into it. Maybe they're hiding below the radar, but even more than that, it's to be open minded enough to take new information. So my mantra has always been, since I was like 24 years old, every single individual that I meet on this planet, I will get value out of. And I had somebody tell me one time, you're like one of the only people that I've ever seen that can relate to a bum or billionaire. Because even that bum, they didn't start off life as a bum. There's two common denominators when you come in this world, man. You're either bald or naked. We're all the same. It's just along the way, man. They got lost on their journey. There's some of the most brilliant people on the planet that are on the street corners. All you gotta do is go to San Francisco, man. Go down the streets of San Francisco. Are these people that are not intelligent, they're not smart? No, it's just they lost their way. And the reason they lost their way is they didn't have a coach, they didn't have a mentor. Now, spinning back, both of my parents did not go to college. Both of my parents couldn't set me up for what success looked like. I ran into a mentor when I was 25 years old that gave me the book, Think and Grow Rich, Change My Life. Because it gave me a concept, it gave me an idea, it gave me information. Then what it did is it fueled my fire. Because you talked earlier about something else that I want to touch on here, motivation. Motivation is the worst word on the planet. You know why? Why? Because motivation is temporary. What you want to focus on is inspiration. Motivation is to get the idea that I can do more with myself. And then to say, you know what? I'm going to battle myself. I'm going to take the first step and I'm going to change my life. The problem is most people can't do that. So with a coach, I'm going to push you so hard that you're going to break through those barriers. But the true transformation point, the true catalyst happens when they start to win. Because when you start to win, it becomes addictive. And then what happens when you win is you start to believe. Many things in life, they're difficult to believe because you can't fathom how it's going to all come together. But the powerful thing about the universe is once you go forward in action, everything else will come together. Absolutely. Absolutely. Jeff, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for your wisdom. It definitely took a lot from this. I know the first thing I'm going to do after this is contact you about coaching because I know my team needs some coaching. Tell me, where can your team find you? Yeah. So if anybody wants to check me out, jeffbounds.com is my website. I'm on social media on Facebook, The Real Jeff Bounds, and on Instagram at Jeff Bounds. And again, man, I love to talk to everyone. And I give everybody a free 15-minute strategy call, coaching call, whatever you want to really just have a baseline to understand where you are and where you need to go. My main initiative in the world is to help as many people find their way to be able to get to the next level in life. Because I firmly believe that that's the biggest intrinsic problem in the world is that people just don't have that mentor. They don't have that roadmap to get where they want to go. Once they do, we'll all change the world one person at a time. Nice. Love it. Love it. Thank you so much. And we'll definitely talk again, Jeff. Thank you so much. Thank you, Robbie. Thank you so much.