In today’s episode, Mike talks with Jeremy Pope. Jeremy assists clients in overhauling their sales strategies, focusing on the balance between networking and prospecting.
He’s the co-founder of The Closing Engine, where he works with clients to uncover and transform the limiting beliefs that keep them stuck in ineffective sales patterns. His unique approach has helped many businesses bloom through effective networking, alleviating the pressure of prospecting. Jeremy is also a fervent advocate of individualization in sales processes.
Jeremy Pope’s Bio
Jeremy Pope is a former clinical and stage hypnotist who now helps entrepreneurs build scalable high-ticket sales departments. He’s been a top salesperson, sales manager, and sales trainer for international businesses, including the direct-marketing giant Guthy Renker. Now, he and his team at The Engine Room help build high-ticket sales departments and help founders repair broken sales methods. You can join their free Facebook community at salescalloverhaul.com/join
In This Episode…
- Uncover the difference between networking and prospecting, and how to strike the perfect balance.
- Learn how individualization can boost your sales effectiveness.
- Discover how to leverage networking to promote a give, not take, mentality in your sales process.
- Gain insights into overcoming business blocks and personal growth challenges.
- Learn about Jeremy Pope’s unique approach to sales with a focus on the psychology behind it.
Links & Resources Mentioned…
- Website: https://salescalloverhaul.com/join
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremy-pope/
- Book an appointment with Jeremy at https://appointment.salescalloverhaul.com/15mins-jeremy-zoom
Mike O'Neill: Welcome back to the Get Unstuck In On Target podcast. I'm Mike O'Neill with Bench Builders, and with leadership coaching and people skills training, we help companies solve the people problems that are slowing their growth. Joining me today is the founder of The Engine Room, Jeremy Pope. Jeremy is a former clinical hypnotist who now helps entrepreneurs build scalable sales departments.
He's been a top salesperson, a sales manager and sales trainer for international businesses, including direct marketing giant Guthy Renker now he and his team help build high ticket sales departments and helps founders repair broken sales methods. Welcome Jeremy.
Jeremy Pope: Thank you for having me, Mike. It's good to be here.
Mike O'Neill: Okay. If people are listening to this introduction, they might have heard me say former clinical hypnotist. I could have also said former clinical hypnotist that also has done that from a stage standpoint. How does a former clinical hypnotist who has stage experience, how in a world do you get into the area that you in, and how do you use your hypnotist background to help your clients?
Jeremy Pope: Well, Goodness. Okay. So those are two different answers. The first answer is actually a pretty boring one, so I'll answer that fast. So I started doing hypnosis and I was doing you know, stop smoking, weight loss, chronic pain, asthma, allergies, and phobias. That's, those five were my, 90% of my business.
And I started training other hypnotists. And I've, I've trained about a hundred hypnotists in how to sell and how to do hypnosis, and that got me into the coaching communities. Which eventually got me into the online coaching communities, which got me into the online marketing communities. And then I ended up as the first client success director for a small company called Traffic and Funnels.
And I built out a bunch of funnels and helped build a bunch more. And then branched out on my own in 2017. I, I mean, I've been doing sales and sales training since 2000 and 2005 respectively, but went back out on my own around this, entrepreneurial, mostly online market in 2017. So that's kind of kind of how I got here.
The second part is how do I use the skills. Well, to some extent, leadership is persuasion, is romance, is coaching, is sales, is motivation, is influence. Like the, the structure changes depending on what you're doing and what the needs of the situation are. But you're always motivating. You're always moving people from one spot to another.
So learning how to get buy-in and how to leverage that buy-in appropriately. That's a significant part of it, I had a guarantee to fulfill as a clinical hypnotist if I could not motivate my clients effectively. And so you learn very quickly what motivates and what doesn't when you've got your entire package price on the line there.
So then the other, the other part I, I guess there are a lot of skills that go into that skillset. That's a high level view, but the other part is what I call the million dollar ear. And learning to listen effectively. There are a lot of people that listen, but they're not listening for what they think they're listening for.
And when you teach them to listen for what actually matters, it makes a tremendous difference and it makes it very obvious what to say next. It makes it very natural, what to say next. I talk a lot about how there are no magic words, only magic feelings. Kind of like the Maya Angelou quote, "The people will forget what you said, but they'll never forget how you made them feel."
It's kind of the same thing, but when, when we're trying to make sure that we accomplish a certain. Imagined scene in a sales call or a certain set of feelings in a sales call or a certain set of commitments in a sales call, the script stops mattering once people are beyond a certain skill level, and so we don't do magic words in our structures.
We only do magic feelings. Have you accomplished this feeling? How can you tell? Are they telling you? Are you seeing it? Are you hearing hesitation? All that kind of stuff. There's a lot of calibration that I learned from the hypnosis world, but a, one of the biggest things that I learned from that was how to listen for the metaphor that they're using.
If somebody says, I'm stuck, they could mean like they're imagining something when they say I'm stuck. They're imagining something right now, and they don't physically mean it. If they do, they wouldn't be on the phone with you. They would have traveled down Maslow's hierarchy to the physical safety level, and they'd be, they'd be focused on that instead of your conversation.
So they mean it metaphorically, but. They could mean they're imagining themselves in a pit of tar. They could imagine themselves in a hole and their arms are pinned to their sides. Sides. They could imagine that they are behind a wall on a path and they can't get past the the wall on that path. They could be imagining a lot of different things and each of those, you deal with it a little bit differently.
So watching for what they're doing and listening for what they're saying and being able to use their language back to them so they don't have to do the men. The work of mental translation, that's a big deal in the million dollar ear process. Side note, when I registered the domain, Million Dollar Ear, I realized it also spells Million dollar Rear.
So that was, unhappy accident, but you know, maybe I'll figure out a way to use that in the future someday.
Mike O'Neill: Yeah. I realize I opened this with not one, but two questions back to back. I didn't mean to do that.
Jeremy Pope: I'm just glad I remembered them.
Mike O'Neill: Well, but it means you were listening very, very well and you responded in a, in a way that made a lot of sense.
Let's go back. I, if I was to entitle this podcast episode, it really is keying in on what I think might be the name of your upcoming podcast, and that is, The Sales Call Overhaul. And if I understand correctly, amongst other services, you help people who are in this sales area. Oftentimes it could be coaches, it could be business owners, but you're trying to instill behaviors, and I kind of wanna go back to that million dollar ear concept.
Whereas hopefully I was listening close enough, but you were talking about the importance of the feeling that a person is expressing and that if they use an example of being stuck, it's helpful to understand what they mean by that because they have a, maybe a visual image of what's in their head.
But I get the impression that what you're trying to key in is not only the visual image, but the feeling that it connotes
Jeremy Pope: I am. And you can't always get to it. It's not always appropriate to dig into every little detail on a sales call, you've got 45 minutes, or you've got an hour, you've got 20 minutes, or depending on what the call is and what your team's sales cycle is.
You, you, I mean, that's, that's up to the process more than anything else. So you have to structure to fit the environment. But I always want to know these things. If I could imagine exactly what they're imagining, I would. The, the mind is a black box and there's a lot of translation difficulties that most people are not aware of.
Like, we don't even know, we're not saying the same things and thinking the same things. We think language is language, right? I mean, a word means the word, nose means nose, but if you and I picture a nose, we're picturing different noses in our mind. You might have a cartoon nose, and I've got a Salvador Dali nose, or you might be picturing a specific person's nose or something.
The first time that this really came up to me was I was doing a weight loss session with one of my first clients. This was in my first couple months of doing hypnosis. And I was doing a part, part of it was like a guided visualization of a staircase. So we were just deepening the, the hypnotic state.
And I told her now, with every step you take on that staircase, you'll go even deeper inside or some, you know, pattern type of language. And so I, I started counting one. Take that first step down. And she jumped and I was like, oh, we had a problem here. What was this? But I, I kept going and kept watching her, like just like a hawk.
And she was fine after that. And we did the session and she got good results and she was fine. But I asked her, what was that jump? Did you notice that you jumped? She said, oh, yeah, honey, I, when you told me down, I was imagining a staircase up to heaven. And then you told me, take a step down. And so, I was like, oh, well that would matter.
Like that, it, it really brought home how much that internal metaphor matters, like what is the scene that's going on? That had a very different feeling than I intended. Even though the language was on point, I realized I needed a little bit more setup. So from then on, I said things like I put my adjectives first in hypnosis.
We don't have to do this in sales, but in hypnosis, you say a big green house. You don't say a house. And it's big and green, like you put your adjectives first. So there's all kinds of ways that you need to structure things to take the workout. Steve Krug is a designer and a designing tr designer trainer.
He has a book called, Don't Make Me Think. And he and Daniel Kahneman. In thinking fast and slow. I think they both talk about this, but it might be Dan Arle. I get Kahneman and Arle mixed up sometimes, but they talk about how when someone has too many choices, it's paralyzing. So you give three choices.
You don't give four choices typically. It uses up the executive function, which I'm hyper aware of due to my ADHD and my, in the last couple years, my understand, my new understanding of executive function and executive dysfunction. And so we don't want to use up their available mental energy on trivia.
We want them to be able to make an adult healthy moving forward kind of decision around what we care about around the, the overall decision of the sale. We don't wanna fritter away all their mental energy on friction. And so if I speak decent Spanish, I don't, but if I did and you don't speak English, then why would I try and get you to speak English with me instead of just speaking Spanish?
If I can speak someone's mental language, I'm gonna, and that's, that's a big part of what it comes down to. And we free up enormous amounts of brain power that way. So it, it's just a, it's a gift to them. It's a kindness to them. And it helps turn them into our dance partner instead of an opponent in the boxing ring.
And it, it just, it lets you sell collaboratively when you think that way.
Mike O'Neill: So let's get into the, the sales process a bit. I know that it's hard to generalize your clients, but what I'm finding is sales and sales reluctance is much more common than people realize. And as I understand your sales call overhaul is specifically designed to improve the close rate.
You actually quantify it, and that is, I want to get above that boring industry standard of 14.5%. And you have shared that you kind of address it in two key areas, the actual sales call and the mindset. Do you address those in that sequence or different sequence?
Jeremy Pope: Well, in our sales call overhaul package, we have a certain sequence for it.
But if, if I'm just doing coaching with a sales team or I'm installing a sales ops system to hire the first sales team or things like that, then we address it whenever it comes up. So in the sales call overhaul the, the single salesperson package. This is as of the time of airing. This is about a $5,500 package.
It has 13 deliverables, and this is the one where we do three sales call reviews. So they send in their recorded sales calls, we go through it line by line, and like reading the transcript as we're listening. And we just list out maybe 40 different items that need. To be rated higher or we rate those items and sometimes they need to be rated higher.
And then we give the three highest leverage items. Like, this is what I want to hear different on your next call. Nobody can remember 40 different things, but you can remember three. And that's kind of pushing it sometimes. But when, when we notice something in that sales call review that, oh, this is, this is a mindset issue here.
This is not a mechanical issue. It's not a tactical issue. This is a strategic mindset issue or an emotional issue. There's a, there's something that the salesperson is afraid of here, or they're being defensive around this, or they're, they're rebelling against a boss or something like that. And this is, so we, we've got a maturity issue to deal with.
Anytime you have a mindset issue you might know what to do, but you can't bring yourself to do it is the way that manifests a lot of times. So we have two belief buster calls in between the, the three sales call reviews. So they just kind of slot in between there and just bust up any beliefs I found.
There's a structure called Dilts, Dilts Logical Levels from Robert Dilts, who is one of the, not necessarily founders, but one of the founding. Sons of NLP, neurolinguistic programming, all the Tony Robbins type stuff. So this was back in the seventies, and he came up with something he called the Neurological Levels of Change, and he got some of that from Albert.
I don't remember where he got it from, but he added a couple levels to somebody else's thing and it became part of the NLP corpus. And so the Neurological, Dilts' logical levels is what most people call it. You can find pictures of this pyramid all over the internet if you Google it if you need to, but it goes behavior skills or, sorry, I started it wrong.
Environment behavior. Skills and capabilities, beliefs and values, identity and then purpose, mission, vision, transcendent spirituality. Everybody calls the top thing something different. But that when, when we have a mindset issue, I find, or any, any kind of maturity issue in sales or in leadership. I do a lot of leadership coaching and, and like delegation, figure it out, things like that.
And there is a 70% chance, I'm just hanging out at that beliefs level, about four levels up on that pyramid, and then just popping down to the behavioral level once in a while or to the environment level. Okay, let's set up a structure where the person doesn't have to do it, or let's set up a structure where it removes the friction.
Kind of like how with a standard operating procedure, you wanna keep that SOP as close to the work performed as possible so that it doesn't require nine clicks to go find out how to do this task. That's in the task management system. It is things like that. So sometimes, An environmental change can give a lot of relief at the identity level.
Oh, I'm a bad person because I'm a bad salesperson because I can't do this thing. That's hard for me. Well, there's a lot of things I can't do as an ADHD person. And there's, I, I'm not really of the, the mindset that a ADHD is a superpower or things like that, like it's just pretty much straight deficiencies for me, and I'm smart and I can deal with it.
Sometimes, but I have to support myself very carefully and very thoroughly. And so when I set up my environment correctly you, you may have heard my alarm go off just as we were getting started here. That was my alarm, so I did not have to think about when I was due to sign into your Zoom for this podcast.
Like I set up a lot of environmental things so my brain can do the stuff that matters to me. And I don't put friction on myself, so you have to bounce around. But in those belief buster calls, we're hanging out at that belief buster level, and we are just making sure that the salesperson has mechanisms and has the plan to be able to address.
Their identity and their beliefs appropriately and and mature through this process. My mission in life is to set people free, to help people grow up and help people get closer to God. That is what I care about. If I'm doing those three things, I'm running Jeremy correctly, and so this is just one of the ways that that plays out in the business context.
Mike O'Neill: For those who listen to these podcasts in sequence, it's pretty amazing what you just shared because it kind of summarizes two of my most recent guests.
Jeremy Pope: Oh, wow. Okay.
Mike O'Neill: One of those, Judy Kane, helped our listeners better understand how to get rid of the head trash that much of us go into particularly sales. And that was kind of her niche.
Susan Borke: I'd love to talk with her. That sounds great.
Mike O'Neill: Well, I would encourage you to listen to this episode. Judy is a great resource.
Jeremy Pope: Will do.
Mike O'Neill: Someone who you may already know, Kristina Proctor. Kristina is a expert on ADHD and she works with clients on, on how to kind of embrace that.
And it's really kind of magical how you mentioned elements that came up in my conversation with Judy. And my my, my conversation with Kristina, but it tells me there's a recurring thing. I know we've kind of talked a lot about almost the, the philosophical aspects. I want to get down even at a, even at a deeper level, but those who are listening, you're a business owner, you're a business leader, and part of your role is sales.
Jeremy Pope: Yep.
Mike O'Neill: Some people tap to it naturally. Some people really struggle with it. What is it that typically triggers someone that pick up the phone or drop you a note and say, Jeremy, let's talk.
Jeremy Pope: Boy, I like that question. I talk a lot about givers stuck in a taker process. So of course anybody who is having trouble around sales might be interested. I mean, just personal vibes or, or whatever. But the people that I find are usually getting in touch are people who work hard to be kind. And I, I think most of the people around them would agree that they are successful in that aspect.
And a lot of those people, Adam Grant in his book, Give and Take, talks about this, it's a whole book on this topic, and it's a great book and it's helped me clarify my thoughts on this. But he talks about game theory and givers, matchers and takers. And I've, I've used the language for a while, but it's, it's just an amazing book.
I highly recommend it. So the, the givers are prone to different problem. They are takers have to, if they're coming from a taker mindset, then if they're gonna be ethical, then they're gonna have to watch themselves. So their, their problems are more on the ethical side of things. The givers are more on the people pleasing or the boundaries side of things, and we can certainly help both of those types, but, If a giver founder, for instance, I work with a lot of entrepreneurs, more so than sales managers, but, and, but founders and their teams is, is typically where I am.
And a lot of those founders have learned their sales process from a Biz Op guru, a start your coaching practice or a start your agency or a start, your this, start your that, start your plumbing business, whatever. And the Biz Op space is almost like the multi-level marketing space. In, in its level of predatory 99.3% of people in multi-level marketing companies fail, like they lose money net.
And, and it's similar in the Biz Op world in the course space, less than 4% of online courses get completed. This is a huge problem and it's a well known problem in the course industry and it interacts with a lot of different things. So I mean, any coach worth their salt cares about completion rate.
It affects their liability. It affects their ability to upsell to the next thing. Like somebody doesn't complete your first thing, they're not gonna get the sales pitch at the end of the next, at the end of that, to get into the next program. It affects the level of testimonials that you get. It affects how you feel about your own program and how willing you are to sell it.
I mean, there are, there are a lot of things that go into that. I've just gone down a rabbit hole. Let me try and climb back out. So, with. No, I can't do it. I need help. So how do we get on that? I'm sorry.
Mike O'Neill: Well, actually I'm, I'm listening to you and I'm, and I, you're kind of drawing me into the conversation.
I was asking in terms of what triggers right, the call to you.
Jeremy Pope: Thank you. So givers have different problems than takers. That, that was where we started off. So the people pleasing and the boundaries issues. A lot of salespeople, when they're having anxiety, it's because of that, givers are a bit more prone to it than anybody else.
So we are doing a lot of belief work around those things. And so if, if someone who's trying, I, I hear this a lot in the, well in the SAS field too nowadays, but impact centered businesses or impact focused businesses or world changer businesses, or we've got this 501 structure where it's an like a for profit but for benefit, I think they call it a public benefit.
Things like that. These kind of folks they can make a change in this area. By getting very mission focused, by getting in the other person's head and by using a process that fits being a gift in every moment. And it feels very natural for these folks that these folks have often been struggling by using a sales process that really doesn't fit their natural style for a long time.
And so, of course sales is gonna feel weird when you do that. Of course it's gonna feel like a grind when you do that, and it might even feel slimy or unethical. Although most of those people, they don't hang out in sales for very long. If, if it's feeling that bad, like unethical, you're just not gonna sell anything in.
You're gonna go under and you're going to go find a job, or you're gonna go find a part of the business you can focus on and partner up with somebody where you don't have to sell. But the solution to that usually is, What can I do for you right now at a heart of service? So that, that's pretty straightforward.
But getting in the other person's head is one way to do that. Doing the mental translation for them so they don't have to, so they can spend their work of decision. Decisions are a lot of work. Indecision is crazy expensive. It's one of the most expensive things in business. And the indecision and delay, like, boy, you can't go broke much faster than like plugging those into your brain all the time.
So giving them the gift of the ability to make a good, healthy decision right now on this call. Or the next step to a, a decision around this or things like that. That's a big part. Just you can't have imposter syndrome if you are hanging out in somebody's head with them. Instead of trying to keep them out of the wrong parts of your head, if you just go join them, it's very hard to have imposter syndrome.
So, a lot of what we do is focused around that. And then when people, you mentioned call reluctance or some version of that. Once selling feels good, you don't have to be a 10 out of 10 on skill. Like founders, founders can get to a 60, 70% close rate pretty frequently if they're just at a six, outta 10 on scale, on skill.
I mean, and then when they have a, a healthy process that's ethical all the way through, and that feels natural to them as a giver. They're gonna go start selling, they're gonna go start, they're gonna stop being reluctant about this call. A lot of this is personal individualization. Wow, that's a lot of syllables.
Personal individualization. So, I found all the best podcast hosts. Learned to laugh very quiet.
Mike O'Neill: I'm, I'm, I am laughing.
Jeremy Pope: Instead of, yeah. So personal individualization, one of, one of the ways this comes out a lot is I call it the networking versus prospecting spectrum. So networking to me is super fun and.
You, it's, it's the kind of connection you make where you don't know where it's gonna go. Maybe it leads to a podcast interview, maybe it leads to a couple of referrals back and forth. Maybe it leads to a brainstorming session. Maybe it leads to we mail our lists, we cross-promote to our lists.
Like you don't know where it goes, and maybe they end up being a, a, a client. But that networking. I can do that all day long. I have to limit my networking time cause I don't have time to write if I do all that stuff. But then prospecting, that is where you have the product and you're finding the people to match the product, the people who need that product.
And it's legit, it's totally legit. Like I don't have anything against it, it's just I can't do it personally. It's just, it goes against everything. In my brain, but networking, you find the people and then you match the product to the people. And that kind of, I'm way over here on this side of the scale and I have a very hard time doing the prospecting.
And so that's just one easy example of like, and the reason I can't do prospecting effectively, it is, well ADHD. I can't keep track of too many people in a CRM, but. I feel like a taker when I get into prospecting, and I haven't found a way around that in most prospecting processes. I, I, I take that back.
I found a lot of ways around that. For me personally, I found it's easier just to network instead of prospecting, cause I get plenty of business when I network effectively. So maybe that's a shift that lets you feel like a giver all the time in your sit. In your sales processes or lets your team feel like givers all the time, and you'll see people blossom in your sales team that you were giving up on.
When you give them a process that fits them, not everybody is cut out for it, and that's okay, but like you saw promise in this person and they are vastly underperforming for some reason or another, there's a very good chance that. The process does not fit them. Whether it's a give or taker thing or whether it's some other part of the process, they're just not wrapping their heads around it or they, it just makes them feel bad for some reason.
Or it activates beliefs about themselves. You, you said the head trash. I like that phrase. I've heard that for a lot of years. But the, your last guess, who was she that talked about that?
Mike O'Neill: Judy Kane.
Jeremy Pope: Judy Kane, right. Thank you. So I mean, it's activating head trash and so a process that. Removes friction. Boy, that's a good process right there.
Mike O'Neill: Jeremy, one o f the things I really love about being a podcast host is I get to meet smart people like you who introduces concepts. Earlier this week, I was advised to, to be thinking about sales, very similar to what you just described. And that is to enter into a conversation. Saying in so many words, I like to kind of just treat this conversation like it's a, a networking opportunity.
Is that you're trying to basically diffuse, I'm not here to sell you or pressure you, but when you are in a quote networking conversation and you are in a, how can I help mode? A give mode, then you're not trying to force a certain outcome. You're just seeing kind of where it goes. What I'm hearing you describe it, it may not fit in the model you're describing, but if you could give yourself permission to not force an outcome, but to be fully present, that you're there to really understand.
And to perhaps feel the issues that they're feeling. That it, what it does is it takes down, it takes out some of the, that. Potential feeling of I'm trying to force it an outcome. Some of that ickiness agree that that might come.
Jeremy Pope: I agree a hundred percent with that.
Mike O'Neill: You know, Jeremy, one thing that I always try to ask each guest is to share one example that you can think of, and you've already kind of done so, but an example where either you or a client got stuck and what did it take to get unstuck?
Jeremy Pope: I think all my stories are about getting stuck in some way or or another and, and getting out of it. I get stuck a lot, man. I, I'm very much a mess into message kind of guy. Just cause I'm, I am not that effective without good structures and systems around me and, and with me and good. I always say the best, the best thing about me is my people.
And I, I've, I will never be able to claim that I'm a self-made man, that there are so many people that have helped tremendously when I was stuck. So, the, the, the deepest ways that I've been stuck have all been around maturity in some way or another. I had a hypnosis mentor in, I, I think I met him in 2005.
It was either O five or O six. Scott McFall. And he and I are, I mean, he's not my hypnosis mentor anymore cause I don't do that stuff anymore professionally. But such a great guy and he taught me more about growing up than anybody, aside from my parents. And he recognized. So when I came to him, I was stressed out about probably most things and unable to move beyond.
Some pretty significant business blocks. Just wanting my own way, and this came for me from.
I am a smart guy, and I learned at a very early age that if I can just put more energy into rebellion than my parents have available for compliance, then I win. That's a terrible lesson for a four year old to learn or whatever. I mean, it, it went for a long time. So the lesson that you get from that, I, I'm a, I'm a deeply committed Christian, and the lesson that I got from that was parents who are kind of a kid's earliest model of the world and a model of God, and, and a lot of relationships.
It comes from your understanding of your relationships with your parents. I can beat God. I am smarter than my parents. I'm smarter than God. I'm smarter than the universe. I'm smarter than whatever. I'm smarter than the world. So that, that was the lesson that I took for a long time. And then what I came up against was the reality, but I didn't know how to recognize it for a long time.
I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. And so when you have that dichotomy going in your head of. I'm smarter than anybody who might have been able to help me had I only been able to admit that they were smarter or that they were further along or more mature, or that smart didn't matter at all in this instance or, or things like that.
Like smart isn't everything. It's a little bit of the equation, right? Determination is a lot more than smart, things like that. So being able to actually learn and internalize lessons from other people was really hard for a long time until Scott came along. And he busted me out of that brutally, and it was the best thing that I think anybody ever did for me.
But he could see the blind spots from the outside. He, he had that objectivity and he'd seen many people run this kind of pattern before, especially in the field of hypnosis. Like you pick something weird like that to do for a living. There's, there's something else going on a lot of times, like you've intentionally gone after the unusual and so, He spotted those patterns because he'd seen him a thousand times and he just hammered me on it.
He stayed on topic no matter how boring it got for him until he got through to me around that. And he kept me from putting him on a pedestal and thinking he was, you know, all knowing. And he inoculated the relationship against that. He got, he, he got that buy-in early and he levered it. I mean, and I, I talk about levered buy-in architecture in sales all the time, but that was, that's probably the biggest example I can give of being stuck for a long, long time.
It was a, it was a rebellion fueled misconception of the world of how smart I was. The, and here, sorry. Here's the reason that it mattered so much. Here's the reason it was so. Such a destructive form of sabotage was because if I'm smarter than God, for instance, and I can't figure this out, God can't help me.
Like that's a really disempowering way of understanding the world. I, if I'm smarter than everybody else, then I can't be helped. If I can't figure it out, I'm done. It's all over for me. And I was never suicidal or anything like that, but I was in despair for quite some time and just, I was, my biggest fear was that I would never be able to get through a problem.
I was just bad, you know? And so, I mean, all this stuff, it goes deep. It goes deep, and it always does. I've never met someone with an easy life. They have an, they have. A hard life externally, or they have a hard life internally. Like you try and make an easy external life, you're gonna have a hard internal life.
You have to do some hard external things. But Scott helped me connect those things. So it was a, I don't know, that was maybe a different kind of answer than you were hoping for, but that's, that's what was meaningful to me.
I didn't really have an expectation what the answer would be. What I would say is we've now recorded well over a hundred episodes and it's amazing the diversity of responses.
Mike O'Neill: I get to that same question, so I appreciate you sharing Jeremy, as, as you kind of. Reflect on yes, you are bright, you're extremely articulate, and I can see how the approach that you take with clients that your team takes with clients can really be of benefit. If folks want to reach out to you, what's the best way for them to connect with you?
Jeremy Pope: Just go to our resources page. It's salescalloverhaul.com/resources. I'm launching the Mental Model Monday newsletter where we teach a mental model every week. I'll mention the podcast on that page, so they should be able to find everything that we do from that, that page right there. salescalloverhaul.com/resources.
Mike O'Neill: And you've made reference to the podcast. I know that you're in the early stages of launching that podcast. And so if people want to acc access, access it, they can get that through your, through your website as well. Jeremy, thank you for sharing your passion, your expertise, your intellect, and probably a number other words to. Slip in there, but I really appreciate it.
Jeremy Pope: Word as an individualization.
Mike O'Neill: Easy for you to say.
Jeremy Pope: That's right.
Mike O'Neill: Jeremy, thank you.
Jeremy Pope: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a blast.
Mike O'Neill: I also wanna thank our listeners for joining us today. If you'd like to subscribe to this podcast, you could simply type unstuck.show in your browser.
And while you're there, you can also subscribe to our weekly management blog called The Bottom Line. So if you're trying to grow your business, but people problems have slowed you down, let's talk head over to bench-builders.com to schedule a call. So I wanna thank you for joining us, and I hope you have picked up on some tips from Jeremy that'll help you get unstuck and on target.
Until next time.