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Applying ‘Everybody Sells’ in Your Personal Life: Urban Showe, Jr.
| 01 | Aug |
| 2013 |
Jeff Kaplan
By Jeff Kaplan
We're now putting the final touches on a Ferrazzi Greenlight bookshelf offering, titled Everybody Sells, from which this is excerpted.
Throughout this book we talk about some of the biggest companies, the biggest deals and the best salespeople on the planet. But the Everybody Sells sales process isn’t just about those who breathe the rarified air of global success.
In fact, the principles we based this book on came from individual sellers working in small companies and commission sellers who have to fight every single day to make their numbers, or go home broke. But that was just the seed. We also field-tested the system with over 100,000 people who don’t even call themselves “salespeople.”
I have no doubt that the underlying theories and disciplined practices we help clients deploy in their organizations work every bit as well in personal lives away from the work arena. But why is this?
Because the theories we shaped for sellers to develop authentic and valuable relationships in part come from the personal success plans we’ve helped people across America create. The Everybody Sells principles work as well for attaining personal goals as they do for professional goals. After all, all goals are human.
The University of Phoenix, one of the largest private university systems in the U.S., sponsored a program designed to help students, alumni and their families achieve their career goals. They dubbed it “Pathways to Success.” I toured the country for the University of Phoenix for over a year, giving speeches and running workshops for groups ranging in size from 25 to 25,000. We learned many lessons, but one of the most important was that there is no such thing an “an average person.”
Sure, there are people who do things and earn a living that falls in a “statistical average.” They go to work every day. They take home a salary, if they are lucky enough to find steady work. They try to provide for their families, to make sure they are fed and clothed and that their children have a solid education. But that’s where the similarities end.
From Orange County to Omaha, from Miami to Minnesota, I met normal, everyday people with world-class stories and even bigger dreams. I found that the difference between these folks and the most successful people in the world was, essentially, their ability to tie their aspirations (personal goals) to the people who could help make those dreams a reality, which is the cornerstone of the Everybody Sells philosophy.
One of the participants in the program was Urban Showe, Jr., a Southern California professional. I’ll never forget meeting him for the first time. I’d asked some of the participants why they chose to attend the session, and when I called on Urban, he was so shy and reserved that I could barely hear his response.
In that initial session, we discussed the power of
defining success. I gave the group the same advice I used to tell my
business-school students: In business as in life, if you don’t define
success in advance, someone else will define it for you – after the fact, and
rarely, if ever, in your favor. (This notion is the foundation of the
“Focus” step in the FTDAOR process, which we’ll hear more about later.) We
also discussed the importance of creating a strategy to achieve your stated
definition of success – not a strategy based on what you needed to do (tactics)
but instead upon the people critical to your success.
We ended the first session with the question, “Who are the people who hold
the keys to your dreams?”I wasn’t surprised when I saw Urban at the next session. I was, however, surprised to see that Urban had brought his wife and son along! So few people think about the immediate members of their families as the critical relationships they need to succeed.
In the third and fourth sessions, Urban’s guest list grew to the point of filling up an entire table. With his father in attendance, three generations of Showes were making a commitment to the same dream and adopting that dream as their own.
What I didn’t know at the time was what Urban had written down as his goal.
Much later, long after the sessions were complete, I received a note from Urban, thanking me and suggesting I watch a video he had produced on YouTube – a video, of all things, from the “shy guy” I could barely hear in the first session.
The video told a tale about the power of the Everybody Sells approach to achieve any type of aspiration. There Urban was on my screen, wearing one of the shirts we’d given to program participants, standing in front of a group of young people telling the Everybody Sells story! The participants were a group of court-assigned youth offenders seeking to redirect their lives, to create futures where few prospects existed before. I choked up when I heard him ask the group, “Does anyone here know what a goal is?” Nobody raised a hand.
But Urban’s work didn’t stop there.
He shared with me his family’s plans to open a martial arts self-defense school for the young people in his neighborhood. The goal was to give youth the tools and confidence they needed to “say no” to joining the gangs that dominated his community and the physical and mental skills to defend themselves when challenged.
The achievements of Urban Showe, Jr. and his family are a beautiful and revealing example of what you can achieve if you apply the Everybody Sells lessons in your life away from work.
Do you know someone like Urban Showe? Let me know. More stories to follow.
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