IAM1005- Sales Trainer Helps Individuals and Organizations Attain Sales Increases

Jeff Goldberg is the Head Coach and Lead Sales Trainer at Jeff Goldberg & Associates (www.jgsalespro.com) where they’re dedicated to helping individuals and organizations attain measurable and sustainable sales increases. He’s an award-winning sales professional with over 4 decades of sales, sales management, training & coaching experience. Jeff has had the opportunity to teach, coach, mentor, and speak internationally in front of tens of thousands of sales professionals, ranging from financially successful veterans to the most junior new hires in a diverse array of industries.

Jeff delivers powerful, high-energy programs and speeches that draw on his years of experience as a performer in the theatre and stand-up comedy. He is relentlessly energetic and results-driven and injects humor, passion, and a strong dose of reality into all his programs. He has delivered training for clients such as State Farm, Aramark, Siemens, Newsday, Cisco, Citibank, Cablevision, and others representing nearly every commercial and industrial category.

• CEO Hack: Caledarization
• CEO Nugget: Enjoy what you do
• CEO Defined: Making all the choices and also having all the responsibility

Website: http://www.jgsalespro.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheSalesProNetwork
LinkedIn; https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffgoldbergsalescoach/

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Transcription

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00:00 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:43 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, Hello, Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Jeff Goldberg of Jeff Goldberg and Associates. Jeff, it's awesome to have you on the show.

00:53 – Jeff Goldberg

Great to be here. Thank you for having me, Gresh.

00:55 – Gresham Harkless

Definitely super excited to have you on. Before we jump in, I wanted to read a little bit more about Jeff so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Jeff is the head coach and lead sales trainer at Jeff Goldberg and Associates, where they're dedicated to helping individuals and organizations attain measurable and sustainable sales increases. He's an award-winning sales professional with over 4 decades of sales, sales management, training, and coaching experience. Jeff has had the opportunity to teach, coach, mentor, and speak internationally in front of tens of thousands of sales professionals ranging from financially successful veterans to the most junior new hires in a diverse array of industries.

Jeff delivers powerful high-energy programs and speeches that draw on his years of experience as a performer in the theater and stand-up comedian. He is relentlessly energetic and results-driven and injects humor, passion, and a strong dose of reality into all his programs. He has delivered training for clients such as State Farm, Siemens, Newsday, Cisco, Citibank, Cablevision, and others representing nearly every commercial and industry category. Jeff, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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02:01 – Jeff Goldberg

I am because I sound so impressive. Wow, I'm interested in what I have to say.

02:05 -Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. I was actually going to drop the mic after that intro cause you're doing so many phenomenal things. I feel like that speaks for itself, but to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to hear how things got started. What I call your CEO story will lead you to all the awesome work you're doing.

02:20 – Jeff Goldberg

Wow, well, I've been in sales my entire career, which is almost 50 years now. Like most salespeople, I wound up in sales by accident, but it turned out to be right for me and I write for it. So I actually sold Encyclopedia Britannica door to door for 8 years when they were really books. For those of you who are too young, books were things with paper in them and you actually had to hold them and read them. And I've gone from sales job to sales job. Britannica, very fortunately for me, saw something in me that I didn't see in myself and trained me also how to manage salespeople. They had great training for both selling and managing. That's where I learned the art of managing salespeople.

So over my career, I have been an employee sales, sales manager, sales director, national sales leader, and things like that for 14 years. And about, it's about 17, must be 19 years ago now, I wound up looking for my next career move. I had shut down a headhunting firm that I owned and was looking for my next opportunity and answered a blind ad in the New York Times, which turned out to be for a very large, well-known at the time sales training company. And that turned out to be the job I'd been to do all my life. It was just the perfect job for me because I love helping people, truly. I don't say that just to be altruistic, by the way.

I love getting paid for what I do, but I truly get a great feeling out of helping others. And the 2 things I know in life are sales and sales management. Well, being a good dad, For some reason, I was good at that, but other than that, sales and sales management is all I know. So I opened up my own company 17 years ago, Jeff Goldberg and Associates. By the way, you wouldn't believe how much I had to pay a marketing guy to come up with that name, but it's really been a godsend for me because I do get to help salespeople on a coaching, consulting, and training basis on a daily basis. And I get to do what I love to do.

04:07 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that definitely sounds exciting. And I feel like, you know, whether or not you're in a quote-unquote traditional sales job, you're doing some type of sales, I imagine that you probably would definitely say that even as a parent that probably translates over as well too, do you get that opportunity to figure out like what and how to kind of direct everybody?

04:23 – Jeff Goldberg

Yeah, well, there's no doubt that kids are the best salespeople in the world. They're certainly the best negotiators. They know for a fact that 99 no's is gonna get a yes because parents will give in. Can I do this? No. Can I do this? No. Can I do it? All right. Do whatever you want. They're the best. But yeah, they really are great at selling. They'll try your patients much like prospects will. You have to have certain qualities and characteristics to be in sales if you're going to be a professional and be good at it. One of them is patient and patience. You know, putting up with people who are putting you off, telling you next month, next week, next quarter, when hell freezes over, which is what they usually mean.

So there are all kinds of things that are involved in being successful in sales and certainly, patience is one of them and having a childlike wonder of the world, a way of looking at things with new eyes because I don't know your experience, Gresh, but mine is that it's easy to get jaded after a while. You know, you can, after you've been doing something long enough like I have, you pretty much don't run into new situations. But the thing that we have to keep in mind when we're selling is that it's a new situation for your prospect or it's something that's special to them. And everybody wants to feel special. And that's one of the things that smart salespeople do. They make their prospect feel special.

And if you walk in or get on a Zoom call or a phone call with somebody and go, I've been doing this a long time and I know exactly what your problems are and how I'm gonna solve them. Even if you are right, they don't feel good about it. So you wanna make sure that you're always using baby eyes or childlike eyes. So maybe my parenting skills did have something to do with my success in sales.

05:56 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that definitely makes sense. I appreciate you for sharing it. Cause I think so many times we get, as you said, jaded or caught into our eyes and say that I've done this a million times, but in reality for that specific person you're working with, it may be their first time and they go through that experience is something you want to try to kind of embed some of that curiosity into.

06:14 – Jeff Goldberg

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I call it going in stupid. I don't mean you should be stupid, but it's the opposite of going in arrogant. I'll give you a quick example. So I've been training for a long, long time. I've trained, it would be hard for you to come up with a category of company that I have not trained in, an industry that I haven't trained in, but the 1 that I've done the most training in, not because I've gone after it's, 1 refers another, is advertising sales. People who sell advertising. So cable TV, regular TV, radio, newspapers, magazines.

06:41 -Jeff Goldberg

I've done advertising training and sales training for companies that you didn't even realize that was advertising and needed to die until they called me. So the fact is, I could walk into any company in the world that has salespeople that sell advertising and say this, and I'd be right. Gresh, I've been doing this a long time. I've trained a lot of companies that sell advertising. I know what your problems are. Here they are. And here's how I'm going to solve them. And I'd be right. But you don't feel special. And I can promise you this. If you followed me around for a week and went on sales call after sales call with me, you would see that at some point during every single first conversation that I have, my prospect will at some point say, Jeff, I know you're very experienced at this, but we're different.

We're different. Everybody says the same thing, we're different. Wanna know how different they are? 0, there's 0 difference. Now, is there a difference between selling advertising and selling sales training or selling vacuum cleaners? There's a slight difference, but at the end of the day, we all have to do the same thing. We have to get ourselves in front of a prospect or the prospect has to get to us.

We have to establish rapport and get people to like us and trust us. We have to ask a bunch of questions and get great information, which means we have to actively listen, which most salespeople and this is a technical sales training term, most salespeople suck at listening. We have to confirm the answers we've heard. We have to make a presentation based on all 4 of the elements, we have to negotiate effectively, ask for the business, and handle objections and rebuttals. But I also have to make you feel special because nobody likes to deal with somebody who's arrogant or cocky.

08:13 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that's absolutely huge. I appreciate you for going through that process because I imagine that's probably a lot of what you do is kind of showcase that when you're doing training and any type of talks to let people know this is like what the process is. But could you touch on a little bit more about how you work with your clients and what that looks like? And I was going to ask you as well, do you feel like that might be your secret sauce, the thing you feel kind of sets you apart? Is that ability to understand that people want to feel special and how to do that through their process?

08:41 – Jeff Goldberg

Yeah, I think that is part of the secret sauce. See, sales is both a game of skills and abilities and techniques and tips and tools and strategies. And it's also the mind game. If you only work on one and not the other, you're not going to make it.

08:55 – Gresham Harkless:

I want to ask you for what I call now a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or a habit that you have, but what's something that you feel makes you more effective and efficient?

09:05 – Jeff Goldberg

Oh, that's easy. It's something I call calendarization. So one of the things that I hear from salespeople and managers all the time is that there's just not enough hours in the day and I'm constantly behind the gun. I don't get enough done. So what I teach people, what I use personally, what I teach people is called calendarization. And it's a very simple concept. Everything goes on your calendar. And I mean everything.

09:29 – Gresham Harkless

I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client or if you have to do a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

09:39 – Jeff Goldberg

When I work with an organization or an individual, I'm helping them feed their families, their company's families, and their families. And I take that responsibility very seriously. But it's what jazzes me up. It's what gets me excited. It's like, God, I love doing this. You know, when I get a call from somebody and they say, Jeff, I closed a deal that I wouldn't have closed if you hadn't taught me that thing, or I got a promotion because of somebody is I love that.

I just eat it up. So if people aren't enjoying what they're doing, then life's a misery. And that those are the people that wake up every day. Gresham. I'm sure you, I hope you'd agree that, ah, I can't believe we've got to go to work again. I get up every day and it's like, got to walk the dog and I get to make some more money and help some people. I love what I do.

10:20 – Gresham Harkless

I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO, we're open to having different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Jeff, what does being a CEO mean to you?

10:29 – Jeff Goldberg

Well to me, it means I get to do whatever I want to do whenever I want to do it within reason. Being the boss means I get to make all the choices, but it also means the flip side of that, because I say there are 2 sides to every coin, means all the responsibilities on you too. I happen to be a person who likes responsibility. I like being the person in charge. I like to make decisions. I happen to be, you know, we're all wired up a certain way and I'm wired up curious. I'm wired up that I like to make decisions. I'm wired up like you. We talk fast. We move fast. We think fast. It's just the way I'm wired up. So I love that part about it that I am responsible. If I fail, guess whose fault it was. If I succeed, guess who did that?

So I love that part. I love being in charge of your own destiny. I live a block from the ocean on Long Island And I love that I can on a Wednesday afternoon if I want to say, you know what, it's 03:00, I'm going to the beach. I can do whatever I want. I don't have a boss. I've got 3 young kids and an ex-wife. I guess those are my bosses and my dog. But for the most part, the thing I like best is I'm in control of my own destiny. I can make it happen or I can slide into failure, but either way, I'm responsible.

11:39 – Gresham Harkless:

Yeah, that's extremely powerful. And I always say that I always see it as kind of like being an artist because you kind of have a blank mural and you get to create and figure out, okay, what things do I have to be responsible for? What things and how do I want to live my life? How's my day going to go? Where am I most efficient? You get to paint the mural, paint your day related to that, and paint your business. So I love what you said because it just reminded me of that of having that kind of paintbrush in your hand and being able to kind of create whatever you create and the freedom to be able to do that.

12:05 – Jeff Goldberg:

Yeah. It's great when the checks come in, not as much fun with the bills come in, but I go to the mailbox every single day and open it up and there's always a surprise one way or the other.

12:14 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. That's that double side of the coin, as you mentioned, you did so well. So Jeff, truly appreciate that definition. I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do was just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best people can get a hold of you, get a copy of the book, and find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.

12:32 – Jeff Goldberg:

Sure. Well, what should they know? They should know this, that we're all in sales. I don't care whether it's part of your job or all of your job. Do you want to get a date from your wife or husband on a Friday night? You got to sell them. Do you want your kids to do something? You got to sell them. You work in a large organization, even though your title is not sales, you're selling ideas internally. So, everybody, it would behoove everybody to study sales at least a little bit. And if you're a professional salesperson, then please treat it like your doctor or lawyer treats their job study. The beauty of it is there's no cap. There's no cap except you. So that would be the advice I would give people.

If somebody is looking to contact me, I've got a website, certainly JG sales pro.com. You can reach me directly at 516-608-4136 or my email is jeff at jgsalespro.com. And there's one more place. I have a Facebook group called The Sales Pro Network. It's a place where salespeople, whether you sell professionally or just as part of your job, we've got about I thin members right now. And it's a place where they can come in, share their successes, and their challenges, can get free coaching from people like me.

And I've invited all my competitors on there. So we're very generous with information. Every Friday at 10 am Eastern, I do a live interview with somebody who can add to the profession of sales. So happy to help anybody at any time, including people in your audience who just have a quick question they want to ask, I'm happy to give advice. I'm a true believer, Rush, that what goes around comes around. And if

14:03 – Jeff Goldberg

I help enough people, it always comes back to me somehow.

14:07 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely, absolutely. And definitely 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 that last kind of tidbit about how important it is and sales kind of makes the world go around. I think Mark Cuban even has this quote where he says, a lot of times businesses go out of business, not because they have this problem or that problem is because they have a lack of sales problems. So really understanding what that is, what that looks like, and studying it just as the people that we look up to is the best way that we could do that. So Jeff, truly appreciate you again, my friend. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

14:36 -Outro

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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