From Analog to AI: Telco's Journey

[Music] morning everybody I'm super excited to have Eric Brooker on my call today Eric Welcome to our podcast thank you so much I'm excited to be here today I've been talking to you for a bit and you have done some amazing stuff uh we're talking about big leaf you know being a customer of that you work there you have an amazing background in the channel so I'm super excited to kind of you know looking forward to where these entire ecosystem spaces going so maybe before we get going it'll be great if you would please take a minute and introduce yourself yeah no again thank you for the opportunity I'm excited to be here I've got a couple of different things that I'm involved in as I've mentioned to you before I'm an author and a keynote speaker generally talking about things like leadership culture and relationship Capital but the day job if you will the day job is I run an organization that is focused on helping the supplier community in the channel ecosystem ultimately drive more revenue and relevance by by trade I started as a direct sales guy golly about 25 years ago moved into Sales Management ended up getting in on the indirect or the Channel Side ran Channel programs ran Channel marketing and again with a a really great business partner run a firm called the Channel advisors that focuses on on helping that the suppliers brilliant so what does Channel advisor do what do you guys do yeah it's a great question so when we look at the ecosystem of the channel as we know it today I'll talk about the the TSD or the master agent Channel they've gotten a lot of attention the tsds have gotten a lot of attention through private Equity through venture capital and through Wall Street money and Investments The Trusted advisers the agents the msps have gotten gobbled up at such a clip that they're also getting the attention they've been forced to evolve but suppliers are almost exclusively doing the same thing that was winning them business 20 years ago and we refer to where we are now as Channel 2.0 the channels changed we have to evolve so we have a a pretty robust set of methodologies that refine as suppliers go to market strategy and give them the tools and capacity to do things like retain employees longer because you're you're capturing more data in a CRM speaking of CRM we have an entire CRM practice around building your CRM for the channel so you're capturing the right data so you can track things like return on investment on MDF dollars and things like that all the way all the way to a master class that we host that is online and we even do some recruiting in the channel space as well that is awesome so I know we have H spent quite a bit of time in the Telco space and you know whether 20 years ago or 30 years ago for sure Telco used to be analog and then switched over to digital and so that the divide that used to exist Tech versus Telco no longer does having said that a Telco tends to be a little bit still unique compared to the mainstream Hardware software Tech channel so maybe you can tell us a little bit about the ution of Telco as you have seen it from analog to digital to convergence with mainstream Hardware software space and where it's going so it's interesting that you use the word convergence because I talk about the convergence of other channels into the TSD or Telco Channel and all I mean by that is we in the Telco side used to win business like local phone service longdistance internet and then we started selling things like ucast void posted telepan but alongside of us was a manage service provider someone we didn't interact with they won their own set of business things like uh data center things like cyber security and what's happening now is that convergence that you talked about so the the agent the advisor needs to come in and offer a a broader breadth of of solutions because in that convergence what we're seeing is either the MSP or the Telco agent are ultimately going to win all of the business for that end user because the the end user doesn't see value in working with multiple suppliers if they can hammer and nail it down all the way to one trusted advisor one party that they go to for all of their technology needs we're also seeing also seeing a massive influx of suppliers when I started in the channel there were only 40 or 50 suppliers so for me to get my share or as my friend cap would say my unfair share of business it wasn't very hard there were 40 suppliers there were only two that did what I did and it was easy in a in a pond of 10 to 12,000 companies that could sell our product it was easy to hit your number it was easier to hit your goals and objectives there are those same 10 to 12,000 agents or advisors out there but the amount of suppliers is so much higher there's six s 800 suppliers and the channel advisors our approach our data suggests in just the next two years there's going to be roughly 15 to 1,600 suppliers in total so we really have to start setting ourselves apart we have to differentiate and we have to empower the advisers the sellers the msps to know when to bring us in and where we as a supplier Community truly add value someone great uh said that history doesn't repeat itself but it does Rhyme so maybe if we before we go forward we kind of double clicked um and you know I kind of grew up in New Jersey the home of the Big Blue Bell and remember I know I'm going to date myself saying that I remember you know my bell getting split up and little baby BTS being formed so at that time the ecosystem in the Telco area you know we had these IL CLE you know multiple xlex kind of entities and then Triple Play started to happen voice video data conversions that you're saying right the cable guys were coming in satellites coming in so Telco started to evolv so walk us through maybe in three phases 30 years ago 10 or 15 years ago now and 10 years forward in those segments the convergence the meaning of it has rapidly changed in almost at a decade level right and now there's AI so we'll get to that in the last bit but if you dial back a little bit to sort of the big Bell to Mell and baby bells and then how the ecosystem changed that may be a great context for some of our younger audience that were wondering what was a Mel well yeah so you you said you aged yourself I I don't don't go back quite as far but I've been in this nearly 25 years so in 1996 we had the Telecom Act of 1996 which is what you're referring to prior to that AT&T was the big 800 pound gorilla they they they were a monopoly there was no one else to buy from and then we saw some Regional divide which was ultimately AT&T selling off assets so other parties could come to life and if memory serves at that point there were three arbox regional Bell operating carriers and then in that telecom Act of 96 Dev vesture happened so basically Eric with a couple of million bucks could negotiate rates from what then was AT&T Southwestern Bell companies like us West now Lumen and I could buy fiber and copper assets I could lease fiber and copper assets and resell them that's about the time I got into the business so in I think it was Thanksgiving dinner of either 1999 or 2000 I met my very first boss at Thanksgiving dinner and I was making very little money my wife was pregnant we were about to have our first child I needed a real job and he offered me a slight increase from what I was making I started with a company called access long distance out of Salt Lake City Utah all we sold all we sold was long distance and we sold I sold it as a direct rep there was no there was no channel 25 years ago and but believe it or not when I got there two weeks later my first paycheck came from a company now Windstream came from a company called McLoud USA so mergers and Acquisitions in the late 90s early 2000s were happening and within 6 months I had local phone service we started to sell internet which was I it was just wild that you could sell and the sales motion was pretty easy I just had to walk in and say hi my name is Eric Brooker I'm with a company called McLoud USA we are an alternative to us West that was the elevator pitch and the response was I didn't know there was an option I didn't know I could leave us West where do I sign in those early days there was a four or five year stretch where closing business was easy but these carriers like McLoud now we know Lumen and AT&T Verizon Windstream airspring command link they all want to capture as much of the business as possible because back in the day when I sold my first longdistance deal if someone came in cheaper it was easy to to leave but when you start adding products you start to make that deal stickier and the stickier you could make that deal up until about 2005 maybe 2008 the longer the contract the stickier it was the less likely they were to leave they being customers I had a CEO of a multi-billion dollar company tell me one day I worked for him I won't say his name we all suck our job is to suck the least that was the thesis in ' 05 but 05 to 08 we started to see a shift other products like you talked about unified Communications as a service Voiceover IP as many of us know it that entered the market it's taken years for the adoption of ukaz but as ukaz came in contact center as an option came into the market now cyber security sdw you mentioned big leaf all these other companies came in some of them were Niche some of them are what I like to refer to as aggregators but we're at a point now in what are we almost 2025 the value that we add has to be our elevator pitch has to be on point our website has to be clear and crisp with a compelling thesis as to what we do and the value that we bring buyers are younger they're buying faster they're making very strong investments in technology because we have not needed technology the way in which we need it today ever before ai ai is another one I've got a whole thesis on AI and where that fits into the channel that I'd love to share if if we get there awesome so let let's take sort of maybe yesterday maybe not that many you know decades ago when the convergence of voice video data kind of happened you know know they we saw like proliferation of Technologies like zoom and others that rode on the backbone of that you know infrastructure because without that Zoom wouldn't happened and then covid happened a lot of the work went remote then you know streaming happened so bundling something means very different today than bundling menant 10 years ago 20 years ago so if I'm a salesperson in the Telco space selling solutions to businesses to business right what does my bundle look like today oh it it it has to come I think the the technology now I don't want to say is irrelevant but the technology has to be advantageous to the end user there were times in the early days of my career I don't know that I added a ton of value but I saved them money there are an estimated 150 Voiceover IP companies in the channel today I haven't heard this statistic in a long time but I think there's something like 8,000 Voiceover IP companies in the US unless you add value I'm not going to switch but the value chain is changing on a daily basis so if I'm buying local longdistance and internet 20 years ago all I needed was to save money when I'm buying Voiceover IP or a ukaz platform today I need to know that there's a large language model or AI in the background not just so I can say AI but I want it to be specific to the industry to the vertical that I serve I'm a financial institution are you hipa compliant are you PCI Compliant do you provide voice recordings can you redact people giving credit card numbers so the bundles are more Rob bust they're far more technologically advanced but they're driven by Solutions I wouldn't have made it today 20 years ago and all all I mean by that is I sold on price because that's what the buyer wanted you can't sell on price you can't even sell on a brand you and I are old enough to remember the days of and insert your name here nobody ever got fired for choosing I IBM I think that was the original it was Lumen it was AT&T it was Verizon there's very very little of that anymore there is still some but when I walk into an office and I take a true consultative approach and I add value not as a salesperson but as a thought leader in the space that happens to have Solutions your best bet is to say I don't have the right solution let me roduce you to someone that does then it does squeezing them into a product that's not a fit the value chain is much greater today than it's ever been so let's build on that customer value so if we maybe double click based on segments SMB midmarket Enterprise is it possible like if I'm a connectivity provider at a core and then my value wraps around that you know that superpower that I provide connections from some some sort what does that bundle look like you know what is MB purchasing from a change perspective right because you said price is not a switch brand is not a switch so it's really the bundle is the switch what does the bundle look like in SMB versus midmarket in Enterprise and where do you see the greatest opportunity for change the the value chain in the SNB all the way up to the Enterprise is in large part buying the same products but in the Enterprise everything comes custom they have the resources financially and and probably from a human capital perspective to extend resources to do things that the SB doesn't but in the SB they're still buying ukaz and contact center BPO out outsourced call center they're buying sdw because the cost of not transacting back to your point about covid and zoom and everything rides on the internet as a small business owner I run a small business I've got two internet connections and an sdw device my house because the cost of me not being on a zoom call for an hour is much greater than the bill I get for a second internet connection and an sd1 device every month the disadvantage that I have in the SMB space I don't have a lot of opportunity to customize but I still need cyber security I still need PCI compliancy I still need sdwan the I in fact I still need AI I just need AI differently than the large Enterprise the large Enterprise still has people sitting at the front desk answering phones the doctor's office still has someone sitting at the front desk answering phones I don't have that I need a chatbot on my website that can take and answer live feeds from people that I'm interacting with and feed me the qualified stuff feed my business partner the qualified stuff we're all trying to do more with less we're in a down economy right now and yet people are still investing in technology and they're investing in the SMB all the way up to the Enterprise because the value of these offerings is much greater where a small business might buy a product I interacted with a couple of months ago called Hey Libby which is a chatbot it's a very intelligent chatbot I as a small business owner can teach it all that I need in the Enterprise I'm building my own llm and I'm teaching it everything and it's probably going to do far more than the one little hey Libby chatbot application's going to do but I think the technology chain itself is pretty similar these days Believe It or Not makes a lot of sense so let's go back to one point of contention that connectivity brought into our offices and home which is is security yeah when nodes were not connected you know the only Intruders we worried about are the burglar breaking in and the moment the nodes were connected we didn't know who who were in our home who were in our laptop in our data in our storage and SMB suffered the most Enterprise as you said they buy Best of breed they lock it down so where do you see the opportunity in smbn midm Market if I'm a connectivity Provider from a cyber security perspective especially now the nations are involved you know hacking each other is that a big play or is it now kind of shifted towards more the security provider it's unbundled from the connectivity how do you see that happening right now so I see cyber security as a separate stack I see the firms the supplier community that I see thus thus far the most successful by my definition are the ones that are doing cyber security as a standalone so they're not the traditional aggregators the airsprings the command Lings I think they do a good job but I think these Standalone firms are able to extend further resources the reality is is we all came home most of us in the employee chain didn't think much of it I had my laptop I had internet I was going to work from home but from an IT perspective and a senior leadership perspective you're accessing all of our data when I work General Mills is not too far from my home corporate office for General Mills when I work at General Mills I'm on their local area network they built that out in a secure fashion to where I can still surf Facebook I can still go on a Wells Fargo and pay bills I can still do all of those things but they're protecting their data their content but when I'm at home my home internet is far more susceptible far more susceptible meaning someone could get on my network and all of the sudden has access to the information on my computer if I work at 3M or General Mills or corporate Best Buy and I'm working from home some if not all of that data is accessible all of the sudden so cyber secur is more important now than ever and we are in an environment where we have to I'm gonna step out of camera for just a second I've got a device here uh from my friends at infinite Wireless it's a secure internet connection I take this everywhere that I go I take this to the coffee shop I take it to the airport and it's for no other reason that I want to protect my data but most employees are in the coffee shop using Wi-Fi at the airport in a hotel Running on unsecured networks the need for cyber security is greater now not just for that reason but for the reason that you brought up cyber security I hope is at its peak unfortunately I doubt it number one number two the risk of that data getting out whether it be a hack or ransomware or stealing uh intellectual property can and has destroyed businesses the SMB cannot afford to get a $100,000 ransomware attack they can't which is where cyber security and cyber security protection really comes in what I'm hearing though from you is that that solution that SMB is buying around Security is coming from a different provider and not the connectivity provider because during the talk of convergence five or seven or 10 years ago there was an assumption that that was a natural convergence point that your connectivity provider in SMB will provide some sort of a Security Suite right and maybe what I'm hearing from you is that because of the complexity of it that convergence didn't necessarily happen because the specialization need is so high they're separate group of people providing and and where they're not a separate supplier I think of the airsprings the command links and some of the other aggregators they're building their own divisions of their aggregation service to bring in cyber Security Experts so I still think the aggregators are are winning business in that space but they're doing it dare I say they're almost building a separate business unit to support that because the complexity of cyber security is much higher I look at a a cororo I don't know the exact number they used to sell one solution and it was sort of all encompassing of cyber security what they realized is businesses want different things and so they unbundled their product into what I think is 11 or 13 different products and I think I don't know this for a fact I think they're seeing more people bundle it all back up now that they have have the option to unbundle it saying well wait a minute I need that too because again the the risk if the internet goes down the internet goes down everybody go home and work for the day you missed an hour of productivity if there's a ransomware or some other cyber security breach the cost is too great I'm going to come back to this bundle I guess the new word is coel but let's go back and um double click on you know the some of the nuisances we got when we got all got connected other than viruses one of the major nuisance was spam right and I worked in a a security company about 20 years ago we were trying to solve it at the endpoint level or a Gateway level we had very little participation from the isbs and where the technology is today isps play a much bigger role while the Gateway and endpoints still play a role in cleaning it up but because of Ip reputation and other Technologies the architecture has changed substantially how we address issues like spam right so now kind of fast forward I will come back to the coell discussion when you think about fake AI fake videos fake voicemails fake spams texts you know that are proliferating because of AI before we talk about the good use of AI can you share a little bit about where the infrastructure provider are in their play helping companies to prevent against this the new nuisances of fake AI based content you know data video everything else so I was just at an event in Nashville that scans source and intellisis hosted and the new president a guy by the name of Ken Mills got on stage and was talking and he referenced five years ago we used to get texts from our senior leaders and the text was hey this is Eric Brooker I'm texting you for my personal cell phone I'm at an event I need $1,000 in Target or iTunes or Apple gift cards and people fell for that five or 10 years ago it's still happening can address that it's still happening I'm not sure why people fall for it anymore but in the world of AI and in the world of the AI not just the AI generated voice but the AI generated voice that now sounds or looks just like your boss just like the CEO it's becoming increasingly difficult to be able to identify what is AI and what is not I think as end users as consumers we have an obligation to carefully discern how we interact with people if I get a text from someone I don't know hey Eric I hope all is well a year ago I would respond hey new phone or I for whatever reason I don't have your phone number in here and then it I would start to recognize over the course of time hey it's Susie it's been a really long time hey Susie from where and then I realized it was it was spam we're building laws around this and while I say we're building laws around this we just finished a presidential election where I got at nauseum despite having very strong regulations around cellular texting business texting and the associated fines per text which I think are like $10,000 per person I got an unprecedent unprecedented number of text messages AI is starting to Trend in that way I believe the suppliers I don't think they've figured it out because AI chat GPT open AI all these llms they've all been around a long time but they came to Market so quickly I think we're going to start to create laws and build practices but recognize that despite what the suppliers do to prevent us from receiving them we still as individuals have to discern well because stuff's going to get through spam if you will is going to get through yeah because you know five years ago if I called into bank or any financial institution right to check my account status on any form or shape the greatest thing was voice print that yes before that was you punching your password or whatever the pin number or social security number last four digit then he moved into can we record your voice as a voice print now as we get in do you see their technology companies in the startup space trying to address that in a multimodal solution because just voice is not good enough you need no face and other touch or some other from your devices so that there are three or four other inputs that would be hard to fake or that hasn't happened yet so I had a project I was working on with a fellow from India and it came time for me to pay him and PayPal or venmo seemed like the most effective way for me to pay him and he sent me a link to something called Pioneer which is the Indian version of some of these us-based applications the link itself was terrifying it it was professional it was well built it looked like venmo or Apple pay or any of these I went to the website did some Google reviews I then sent the link to payeer directly confirming that it wasn't fact a real payer link and that I could pay this guy with no worries there are so many things going on right now I believe that the most successful suppliers in the community are going to be the ones will go back to Solutions based selling that are selling Solutions not savings even in a down economy that are selling Solutions not a quick fix people are willing to play the long game now I Met A supplier at the scans Source event this week that I believe is the answer to some of the problems that we're starting to see some of the problems that you addressed I don't know that anybody has solved for it at the pace technology is moving I mean now we've got multi I can't get into a personal social media account without multifactor authentication my bank account so I think we're starting to shift away from The Voice confirmation and move back to some of the more analog ways of confirming a person but I think we're going to I think we're right around the corner I just don't know what it is yet makes sense so going back to solution selling which talked about bundles before uh new buzzword is coell or co-selling or co-marketing it's kind of the same thing but in a little different way what's your take on marketplaces how are the Telos and Telco ISP providers or ASP providers today playing around in marketplaces there's a lot of Buzz about the hyperscaler what's the intersection between Telos and hyperscalers Amazon's got a Marketplace which I think drives companies like app direct to get a Marketplace scan Source announce a Marketplace called channel exchange I think it is it's an interesting thesis and I suspect the marketplace will have a place in the long run the average buyer today is under 35 years old in the it space it leaders they're not as old as you and I are they're coming in they're doing a lot of their research online I'm not yet convinced they're buying Tech technical applications online I think they're buying some of the more transactional things we moved into this house five years ago I bought Sentry Link and Comcast circuits online everything was delivered super easy I'd buy a Voiceover IP service online if I was in the need for that some of the more complex products AI I think we still want to talk to people to make sure that it's what I'm looking for to make sure that I can use uh an API integration to tie it to my CRM or some of those more complex things marketplaces are not going anywhere there is a a billions of dollars being invested in the marketplace World someone's going to win had you looked at me 25 30 years ago and said hey this internet thing that's on its way up Eric your you're going to buy everything on the internet had you told me that 30 years ago that shopping malls and shopping centers were going to start to be a thing in the past I would have laughed at you you would have laughed at me that was crazy talk so to think that the marketplace doesn't have a home is I think foolish at this point I'm still as someone in his mid-40s not a 35-year-old younger buyer I still think these more technology intensive products still need that face Toof face I still think they need and want an advisor to give them that warm fuzzy they still want to feel the tangible in the purchase of technology so when I build on that you know what I'm hearing from you is that solutions that are transactional they're possibly well positioned in marketplaces but Solutions or products that are bundled together are more complex you need to think about integration and security and overall solution flow you know they require more complex conversation and they may find it out from the marketplace but not necessarily buying from there so let's go to the other side of the spectrum from a provider perspective I'm a sales RP and and the life that you're describing is a pretty challenging life it's not that life that Eric had from 20 years ago walking in and selling connectivity yeah just based on price right so what is the life of a sales rep looks like their core solution is connectivity and they're wrapping in french fries milkshakes whole bunch of stuff around that but their proliferation of those Solutions how do they learn how do they train themselves how do they survive in that you know thousand skew catalog world so we built a if you're familiar with masterclass we have a masterclass program that we have built an entire educational University all around building things to answer these questions most of the content in there is free but it's starts with a deepr rooted methodology and understanding that it's not about for me it was going door too in a high-rise building 1850 North Central I'd go up to the 21st floor and I'd work my way down to the first floor hope I didn't get kicked out pick up a bunch of business cards and start making phone calls the next day it doesn't really work that way anymore I'm a business owner you're a business leader we work from home I'm not going to door too in a residential uh Community hoping to find the CEO CIO or CTO so LinkedIn is a huge platform that needs to be used partner relationship managers prms are a resource for the partner Community to understand the value that you as a supplier bring that methodology of understanding that the sales process for me that started with the end user now starts with identifying where the partners are are and there's a whole second sales process now now there's the partner sales process and the end user sales process we have a methodology around how to build a CRM what those sales processes need to look like what sales leadership sales leaders and marketers are responsible for doing how to leverage LinkedIn as a platform but really the most simple answer to your question is have a compelling elevator pitch when I tell you my El when you say Eric what is it that you do and I say at a supplier Rich event I say I help suppliers Drive revenue and relevance through the TSD and distribution channels you have a question what does that mean when I sell multiple products when I'm an aggregator if I just said to you hey we're we're uh we're recruiters and consultants in in the tech space okay got it thank you that's not compelling when you tell me that you're an aggregator or that you sell ukaz or VoIP or contact center or BP that's the product that you sell what's the value that you bring to the end user how do you make the partner look like the hero to the end user if you refine that elevator pitch you're going to start having conversations that we all want to have it's people leaning in saying what do you mean tell me more does that is that is that a fit in the SMB I've got a client right now start using verticals hey uh I've got a friend in Phoenix that owns a telecom agency I know that if I say hey these this is what I do he's gonna start asking me a bunch of questions to get to the product but somewhere in there I've told them that we work specifically in healthc care hospitality and finance and I didn't just make that up I know our customer base and I've done research on his website he has Health Care hospitality and finance customers so as I'm rattling off healthc care hospitality and finance he's thinking of his clients I'm adding value in the process that he didn't know it's like the iPhone we didn't know we needed an iPhone when the iPhone came out Steve Jobs introduced us to the technology and there's hundreds of millions of them across the globe we couldn't live without them that's got to be our elevator pitch and we've got to follow a refined process because knocking doors by itself and making phone calls it doesn't work anymore by itself so in this new world and if we kind of split it into Supply demand or consumption and provider kind of a model a consumer and provider model how do you see AI getting stacked on the solution bundle and how do you see AI getting stacked on the provider side like how are the Reps using it to learn better provide better bundles together because they have a large catalog and then what is in the product from AI perspective that they're selling so as an end user as a salesperson I use AI regularly as an example if you're my target client or Target partner there's tools out there AI tools where I can drop your website in and say this firm is an ideal client for me or an ideal partner for me can you find other similarly minded companies in this geographic region my territory and it's going to give me a large swath of competitors so I can start prospecting I can connect with them on LinkedIn I can pick up the phone and call them I can go on their website and do my research but man alive AI from a salesperson perspective there's AI platforms where I can compose an email at the bottom of my composition in the AI platform I drop your LinkedIn profile in and it rewrites it rewrites the email to speak to your disk profile so the email that I have composed is Rewritten in a way that resonates with you more than just me throwing out some canned crap email the tools are out there and it's those of us that adopt the tools now that are going to be most successful in the long run on the AI had you asked me it was November last year where I really embraced AI had you told me AI is not going to be a product in these channels I I again I would have laughed at you that's crazy AI is going to be everywhere what we're finding is AI is a product in the channel but not many AI Standalone companies are coming in as a supplier saying this is what we do we do artificial intelligence we build large language models what they're doing is they're stacking this technology on top of ukaz on top of contact center on top of Bo On Top of cyber security so they're becoming HubSpot Salesforce have ai platforms built into their ecosystems now so if I'm building a marketing sequence I'm now not just doing it on my own I'm doing it with AI I'm finding competitors already in my CRM because of AI so if I had to play the long game here I think I would bet that AI has a home it's not going anywhere it's here to stay it's going to be here for a while it's going to get better it's going to hallucinate less but from a product perspective I don't think we're going to see a lot of AI as a standalone product I think we're going to see it embedded in other Technologies which is going to be the expectation going forward that's a great summary I think we're kind of seeing the same thing you know AI is going from being a tagon like the way Microsoft indes co-pilot yes to more AI enabled applications that are leveraging these models in a more effective way to going to more AI native architectures so we completely see that way so Eric U one other thing I've been always curious about your background that you know you have gone not only personally gone through an enormous amount of change and you know grown as a leader but also so you have helped many companies to grow leaders and become leaders and I know it's a very favorite topic of yours also when when we talk about leadership and in this moment of change that is possibly the most fundamental trait we all need to reflect on that how do we adapt without freaking out how do we reflect without forgetting and how do we sort of you know Envision the future where it's not dark and gloomy that all the jobs are going to go away and you know we will be living under whatever government subsid guys whatnot on the other hand there's a lot more opportunities coming hopefully it will be a lot more equal for more people so how do you see leadership playing this role at an organizational level or even at an individual level and what role are you playing it's a really great question I think for me as a leader and one of the things I I tend to talk about in my Keynotes is the eyeopener for me and when I I think I started to shift my leadership style was when I had a realization that you might not want to work for me for the rest of your life when I started my leadership journey I didn't build a lot of relationship Capital with my team it was kpis it was okrs uh it was TPS reports it was quotas it was all of those things and I I didn't get involved I didn't want to be your friend we worked together it was was either working or it wasn't working and if it wasn't working uh I hated the idea of firing you but I would work you out of the system I would have sleepless nights over it but I had gotten to a point where I was ready to terminate someone a number of years ago I was still very driven by metrics and numbers and data and our Susan our chief HR officer said hey do you mind before we part ways I mean we are we are on the cusp of getting on a teams call to fire this guy you mind if I just call him on the side to just check in and he opened up and he opened up in a way to share that he personally was suffering a really great loss and the last couple of months just he had just got to a breaking point and I had not taken the time to build relationship Capital at all it was all business all the time hit your number I would send texts at 9:00 at at night and 4 o'clock in the morning when I was thinking about it I would send you that note and when I realized that he and I were oddly on the same journey and I hadn't shared that with my boss his same suffering was my same suffering I came to the realization that this was a people first business and building relationship Capital with the people around you is far more important than them Hing their quota because we're all going through something forget work for a minute we're all going through divorce diagnosis depression bankruptcy loss whatever on the inverse of that other people are going through marriage and firsttime home buying and pregnancies and delivery and if we as Leaders don't take the time to get to know the People for People then we're missing the opportunity and I saw my my career and the people that worked with me for me find far greater success when I realized that people over profits was actually a thesis wor worth investing in and that if you have a loss we talked about big Lea I lost my sister-in-law when I worked at big leaf 31 years old I got a phone call at 3:00 a.m. that she had passed away one of the founders Jeff called and said take all the time you need big leaf had served me so well that I knew there was sincerity to take all the time that you need I was gone for weeks but that's what I needed to support my wife and there's Gallop poles there's all sorts of data out there that suggest when you care well for your people they're going to work harder they're more invested in the business they're more likely to put the hours in they're going to produce greater results they're going to stay longer in terms of tenure and they're more likely to recommend you as a place to work so for those of you that think the last like minute and a half of me is nonsense there's actually data around doing the right thing actually pays off the other thing that I think is really a powerful transition for me professionally was that realization that not everybody always wants to work with me or for me or in the business if if if you're working for me as a sales rep and your ultimate goal is to be a greeter at Walmart sounds crazy I should know what your ultimate goals and objectives are but if that's your goal my job while you're working for me and with me is to make you the best salesperson on the planet and and make sure that when you leave to go be a greeter at Walmart that you are the best freaking greeter at Walmart than they've ever seen because I owe that to you your professional Journey should be important to me even if that means you don't work with me or for me a year from now wow what a great way to end this conversation I learned an incredible amount I'd love to have you back specifically to double click on the leadership Dimension Eric thank you thank you for being here I appreciate the opportunity thank you so much for having me

2025-01-17 18:23

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