IAM567- Sales Consultant Provides Training on All Aspects of Sales

John provides sales training and consulting services to some of the world’s fastest-growing companies like Salesforce.com, Google, LinkedIn, Slack, and many others. His over 20 years of experience spans all aspects of Sales at every level from making 400 cold calls a week as an inside sales rep to a VP of Sales at his first startup that was sold to Staples. He’s an active sales practitioner who trains what does every day.

He’s also the proud author of a newly released Amazon best-seller children’s book called “I Want to be in Sales when I Grow Up” which he wrote with his daughter.

• CEO Hack: Maintaining a routine
• CEO Nugget: Stop doing what you're supposed to do
• CEO Defined: Chief sales officer

Website: https://jbarrows.com/
https://www.iwanttobeinsaleswhenigrowup.com/
https://www.jbarrows.com/book

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbarrows

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Transcription:

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:29

Hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on my show today. I have John Barrows of J Barrows Sales Training. John, it's awesome to have you on the show.

John Barrows 0:39

Hey, Gresh thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it.

Gresham Harkless 0:41
Yeah, no problem. Super excited to have you on. What I want to do is just read a little bit more about John and hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. John provides sales training and consulting services to some of the world’s fastest-growing companies like Salesforce.com, Google, LinkedIn, Slack, and many others. His over 20 years of experience spans all aspects of Sales at every level from making 400 cold calls a week as an inside sales rep to a VP of Sales at his first startup that was sold to Staples.

He’s an active sales practitioner who trains what does every day. He’s also the proud author of a newly released Amazon best-seller children’s book called “I Want to be in Sales when I Grow Up” which he wrote with his daughter. John, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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John Barrows 1:23

I am.

Gresham Harkless 1:24

Awesome. Let's do it. So to kick everything off, I just wanted to hear a little bit more about what I call your CEO story what led you to get started with your business, and all the awesome things you're working on.

John Barrows 1:33

Yeah, I mean, it's, try to make it as brief as possible. But it's a journey like everybody else's, and you end up where you are. So grew up here in Boston, still live here, went down in Maryland for four years, and drank my way through four years of college. Didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. So I went from like, I think my first major was art. I realized I was gonna make no money doing that. So got into science didn't like that got into, and finally ended up in business. Because I figured that was a really good way to combine a lot of stuff in marketing as my main degree. But then I got a job, I went out looking for jobs. I didn't really like what I was seeing from a marketing standpoint.

I stumbled into sales, even though I didn't even know really what it was. I mean, I knew what sales were, obviously, but I didn't know what a career in sales looked like. So DeWalt Power Tools scooped me up and worked for them for about a year and a half. It was really more event marketing. It wasn't sales like you got to sign the order type of thing. It was like, Hey, you're already buying DeWalt tools, buy more of them. Then after that, I went to Xerox, I spent a year and a half at the wall, then a year, and then flipped to Xerox and that's really where I got my sales education.

I have to ask what I mean by talking about selling a commodity, right? So copier sales are about as brutal as it gets. I sold to the government too so I couldn't even negotiate on contract. But did that for about a year and a half and then split off and started my own company with a buddy of mine. Actually, a buddy of mine started a company and I had always gone in this alludes to the podcast here and the journey. I was doing what I was supposed to do.

Even though I didn't feel right, like I was in corporate America, right? So I was like, Alright, I guess this is what you do. You get a job here. You work really hard. You get a promotion, you work hard. You get another promotion, and that's what you do. Right? That startup thing, especially back 20-some-years ago, that was for those weirdos out in California. I mean, then honestly, I mean, Gary Vee talks about it. I'm a huge Gary Vee fan, I'm sure you know him as well.

Gresham Harkless 3:32

Yeah, definitely.

John Barrows 3:33

Like 20 years ago, entrepreneurship. That was for like, losers like that was for people who couldn't find jobs. It's like, oh, you're an entrepreneur that means you can't get a real job, right? So it wasn't really sexy. I never had that mentality that this was something that I would do, but I just didn't fit in corporate, like the structure of it, right? I fundamentally didn't like the fact that no matter how hard I worked, I wasn't going to see that stock price move at all. I was replaceable without even trying, right? So when I got my taste of startups, my buddy started a company to outsource IT services. They needed somebody to run sales and marketing. I took the risk, if you will jumped, started with them, and then just started hitting and that's really where I educated myself on sales.

I was taking every training like Sandler, Miller Heiman ties, and I came across this training, it was called Basho. It was the first training that I really liked because it was super tactical. It wasn't this big theory about stuff, whatever it was, like, Hey, here's how to send an email now send the email. I joined Basho and took on some bigger counts, bought on some bigger ones, and then to make a very long story short, they screwed it all up and I took it over. So new CEO came in when they restructured the company to focus more on technology and not on training. 2007 hit right economy fell off and one day a guy fired us all on the spot.

We walked in, there were 35 of us and the new CEO walked in one day. I was like That's it. Party's over. Like we're done. We're like, Excuse me, like what? Okay, it's, we were all thinking what's wind down here, like a month or two or something is like, No I don't think you've heard me like, here's a check, here's a box, pack it out. I've always said, I'm not the smartest cat out there, but I'm definitely an opportunist. So what happened with me was I looked at everybody else freaked out saying, Oh, my God, I don't have a job anymore, I gotta go find a job. I looked at it and said, that dude just walked away from a $3 million company that has a killer product that has an insane client list, and a revenue stream that's already there. I'm like, to me, that's a risk. That's an opportunity.

I jumped on that and that first year, I made more money in my first year on my own, than I had in the past, like three, four years combined. I've what I've been doing is just really my making my own ever since and really just trying to work to elevate the profession of sales. I mean, that's ultimately what I'm trying to do I want to hit my numbers and make some money. But I want to elevate the profession of sales to our mantra or our why, if you will, and sales done. We believe that sales are done. It's the greatest profession in the world when done wrong. It's the worst.

Gresham Harkless 6:05

Yeah, that's definitely powerful. Let me ask you this. So you said, when everybody was getting laid off, you looked at things completely different than everybody else. So where do you think that came from there? Was that something that just happened over time? Or where does that come from?

John Barrows 6:19

That's See, that's a question I've been trying to figure out. Right? Because I think we all nature nurture, right? That debate, to me, is always fascinating. It's like, how much does nature have to do it versus nurturing how to do it in the opportunities and those types of things? I don't remember much of my childhood I had a great childhood to pay off to my parents still married to this day, over 50 years, and living in a decent house we were middle class, I could smack them in the middle. But I don't really remember being all that opportunistic. When I was a kid, I just did, again, what I was supposed to do.

But I think that if I look back on some of the decisions, I've made, the big decisions that I've made my life, I've never spent too much time making those decisions. I've always had this innate ability to with very limited data points, be able to put something together and say, yep, that's a good idea, or nope, that's a bad idea, and to a certain degree, that's gut, what I mean? But I think I've just been able to recognize patterns and play off of things in the past and when I got fired from Staples was a little bit of a wake-up call, right? So my little, I forgot to add that piece. My little Thrive Networks company, as we started, we were the fastest growing company in Massachusetts, that first startup, and then we sold off to Staples, Staples came and bought us.

I spent about a year going through that integration and again, come to find out I'm not a corporate guy and I didn't know it, but it just didn't feel right. When an opportunity came up I'm not a risk taker in the sense that like, drop everything, live have an idea, live on mom's couch, eat ramen noodles, like with no parachute, like, that ain't me, like I'm a calculated risk taker, right? There have to be certain things in place for me to make that leap. Understanding where you fit in business is a liberating thing. So it takes you a while, you have to go through a bunch of experiences to figure out where you fit. But there's a certain point in your career like mid-30s, where you start to come in and say, this is where I fit is an example. Some people are great at pure startup like zero to 10 million, right? Chaos, holy crap, whatever like, that's where they fit right.

Whereas others are great from 10 to 50 million, right? Then the others are great from 50 to IPO, or whatever that is, and then IPO after, right? So where you fit once you figure that out. So I figured out that I do not fit in corporate, and it took somebody else firing me to figure that out. Because I was blinded, I was going through the most I was like, no matter what, even though I knew it wasn't right and I knew it wasn't a good fit, I kept plowing through because again, that's what I was supposed to do, right? I had, who's gonna fire me, I've never been fired in my life, I'm the best rep there is that type of stuff. Fire and I was like, what? Like, and so now I just look at things. It was a learning lesson for me, the guy who fired me, Jay Butler, I asked him afterward.

This is actually a close I trained on techniques and stuff like that there's a there's a close called the doorknob close, which effectively is when you lose a deal, right? After they tell you that's when their defences are down a little bit. That's when you can say, hey, what's the real reason? Because they're gonna give you, hey, you lost on price or whatever. But then once the curtains are down a little bit, you can say, could you help me understand what's the real reason I do that a lot and look, the sleazy sales approach to that is you take whatever they said, you flip it back on, and you're like, No, no, I can do that. Right. That's just that's just douchey sales, right? But I use I learned and I use it as a personal learning lesson, right?

So I reached out to Jay after the dust had settled a little bit, I said, Hey, Jay would you be able to have a one-hour call just it understand what happened for my own personal and professional development? He was more than accommodating like he was excited too and told me he's like John, just the fact that you asked me that tells me more about you than I knew in the year of working with you. He said to me, something that stuck with me to this day because I asked I to go check 10 questions so you could answer him as open and honest as you want. You don't have to answer him if you don't want to, because I'll answer every one of them.

One of the questions I had was, Hey, would you have been open to a meeting like this when I had worked for you like you and me just sitting down and talking about this type of stuff? He's like, Well, yeah, of course, why wouldn't. So I don't know, I was led to the like, because my CEO at the time was trying to protect me because he knew I had no filter. So he was like, he was really trying to keep me away from Jay. Because he's like, he knew that if I just if I was me and I took a filter off that it might fracture the whole thing, right? But I always had that gut feeling that if I just was able to sit down with Jay with a beer, things would be a lot different, right?

So I said, Well, I was told I really couldn't talk to Jay and he was like, let me ask you something, John, what's the risk? I was like, well, what's the risk? The risk is I get fired? Like, what do you think the risk is and he's like, Well, okay, let's play this out. He's like, so you come to me. So you go over your boss's head, your CEO said, last year, and you come and talk to me, right? I shred you, I absolutely berate you, I rip, I rat you out to your CEO. I tell them, like if I had done that, would you have wanted to work for me? I was like, Well, no, definitely not.

So you probably would have been able to make some decisions earlier in your career that like earlier last year that you would have been able to control what you wanted to do next, right and like, Well, yeah, probably. Because now let's flip it around, say you go over your boss's head, you have this and this is how the conversation goes. It's a super fruitful, very genuine, like real cool conversation. He's like, do you think your life would have been different last year? A little less painful? I was like, Oh, shit, yeah, man, cuz it was a painful year and he goes, so I'm going to ask you again, what's the ribs?

Now I look at things with a lens on when I make decisions. I do ask myself, what's the risk? But I asked my I go a little step further and I say, what's the worst case scenario? Like what is literally what? Like, if? Anything, right? What's the worst case scenario, and if you're okay, with that worst case scenario, then go ahead and do that. But if you're not okay with that worst-case scenario, maybe think of another option and get tactical here, right? Like, say you're prospecting. Or say you're in a deal with a client, right? You're midway through that deal that client goes to, right, and you're dealing with non-power, you're dealing with a non-decision maker, and the non-decision maker goes to and you got to get to power, right?

Some of the hardest things to do in sales is go over somebody's head without pissing them off. So you have to ask yourself, are you okay with losing this deal? Right? Worst case scenario, you go over this person's head, they get pissed off, the boss gets pissed off, they tell you to let love take us off your list never call again. Are you okay with that? If the answer is yes, then go ahead and do it. Right? If the answer is no, pump the brakes. Think about another option. So that's where my lens has evolved to, which is, I think I have a natural ability to size up things. I think it's also my lack of patience, that probably feeds that. I'd rather make a decision and make the wrong one than not make any decisions at all. Because I'll learn from the long wrong decision. I won't learn from no decision.

Gresham Harkless 12:57

We definitely don't learn from any decision. So no, I appreciate you for breaking that down. I know you kind of touched on it a little bit about I guess, bringing light to the sales industry, as you said, Could you could you take us through exactly how you're doing, what you feel kind of maybe even sets you apart, and makes you unique in doing that.

John Barrows 13:15

I'm just a believer that in sales because there's such a lack of education, if you've come across something that works, you should share it. Like she's here to elevate. So that's what I did was, I took the training, it made such a major impact for me that after I sold my company, I joined that training company, and now I'm off I'm doing my own. Just because this stuff works, but you asked what's what differentiates? I think it's the fact that we are here at J Barrows. I have a very specific approach, which means we're sales reps first, not trainers, we're sales reps who train not trainers who train sales.

Gresham Harkless 13:52

Nice. Well, I definitely appreciate that. I know you mentioned some of the technical things that you tried to talk about. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So that could be like an app or book or habit that you have, but what's something that does make you more effective and efficient?

John Barrows 14:06

I think routine is key. I think routine is absolutely key having a routine, as I talked to a lot of CEOs about personal brand building and prospecting themselves, right to stay up to date on what's happening out there so that they don't lose touch. They're like, John, I don't I have no time to do that. I just like this brand-building thing. Yeah, sure, fine, whatever. But I gotta I'm on a plane, I'm doing this. I think it's about that routine. It's like working out

Gresham Harkless 14:29

I appreciate those hacks. Now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. That could be like a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It could be around sales, or it could be more general, or something you might even tell your younger business self.

John Barrows 14:40

Stop doing what you're supposed to do.

Gresham Harkless 14:42

Now, let me ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO and we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So John, what has being a CEO meant to you?

John Barrows 14:52

I mean, it's everything right. It means you are the chief sales officer. You're the chief. I mean, I think it depends on the size of the business since you're at right I mean I'm the chief bottle washer, and I do everything I think I'm going to Angular towards my preference, which is you have to be the chief sales officer, so I know there's the CSOs, but this if your CEO can stand up and sell your products better than anybody else out there and I don't mean that just like the actual feature function, obviously but cell division so like, if you can't sell it's gonna be tough. I don't see companies fail because most companies don't fail because the product isn't good and it's not the market fit or they didn't get funding most companies fail because they can't sell.

Gresham Harkless 15:34

I truly appreciate that definition and appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know and then of course how best they can get ahold of you to get a copy of the book and find out about all the awesome things you're working on.

John Barrows 15:47

Yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah, I mean you just hit me up on LinkedIn anyway I blinked is probably the easiest place to hit me up John Barrows, b a r r o w s. Instagram Twitter all the handles John M Barrows on all those. Our website jbarrows.com, has a tonne of free resources and content that we put out there tips actionable things that you can use.

Gresham Harkless 16:06

Awesome. Well, thank you so much again, John, for your time and all the awesome things you're doing, your daughter as well too for Graham added that awesome book. So definitely appreciate you, appreciate your time. We will have the links and information in the show notes as well too, so that everybody can follow up with you. But I appreciate you and I hope you have a phenomenal day.

Outro 16:22

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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