The Action Trap: Why More Activity Won't Save Your Quarter

Joe Terry: We want to run to the action trap so much. We call it the action trap in our book. If you don't create different experiences and shift the belief structure and know what that is, you can do all the actions you want all day long. You might get a little short burst, but you're not going to get long-term repeatable change in execution and results.

Lee Levitt: Welcome back to the Thoughts on Selling podcast. I'm Lee Levitt, sales coach, podcast host, and author of The Second Meeting and Together We Win, both due out later this year. Today we're talking about why more activity isn't the answer—and what is.

My guest is Joe Terry, former CEO of Corporate Visions, author of Surrender to Lead, and someone who has spent 20 years helping organizations stop confusing motion with progress. And as a former NFL player, he can attest to the difference between the two.

Here is what to listen for: The action trap—why your team can hit every activity metric and still miss the number. The four questions that make a buyer stop and say, "Nobody has ever asked me that before." And the mindset shift that earns the second meeting: show up to give, not to get.

If you're tired of inspecting pipeline and instead ready to coach for real results, this one's for you. Let's go.

Today it is my pleasure to have Joe Terry join me for a conversation about leadership. Joe and I go way back. We met many years ago when you were running sales at Corporate Visions, right? Back in the late 2000s. The OTs, as they say.

Joe Terry: I was the CEO at Corporate Visions.

Lee Levitt: You were the CEO and running sales. We met at a function that your company put on in Lake Tahoe. So first question, Joe—and this might be redundant for the listeners because everybody knows who Joe Terry is. He's that football guy. He's the guy that broke his bicycle in an Ironman. Who is Joe Terry?

Joe Terry: Wow. That is a big question. I'll say this: I'm an evolution. A total work in progress. Because I may say some things today that some people might not have experienced from me 25, 30 years ago when we worked together.

I'll go back to the beginning. As a kid, I looked at my life and thought, I'm just an average Joe. I'm an average kid living an average life. Growing up, all my buddies and me were out playing all the time. And I was like, I'm going to be a professional football player. And my parents would laugh at me. Friends would laugh at me. And half of them wanted to be a professional football player too.

Fast forward—I just thought of myself as an average kid, average size. I got into high school and I didn't start my first three or four games. Another player still gives me crap about that to this day. I was in evolution, I was learning. I had moved to this new town in Pleasanton, California. Nobody knew who I was. But I really loved football. I found that I was pretty good at it.

I started working on this craft. Taking the advice of the coaches, working on my body, practicing. And I noticed the next year it completely accelerated. I thought, that's pretty strange. If you actually focus on something, you get exponentially better. That's interesting.

Then here was the tipping point. I'm a junior in high school, 16 years old. I'm in a biology class and this teacher says, "Okay, today we're going to do this exercise—the perceived self and the ideal self." We did this exercise with a collage. Then she says, "Now take out a piece of paper. I want you to write down five things that you want to accomplish over the next five years."

Mind you, this is a junior in high school—average height, average weight, average 2.2 GPA.

Lee Levitt: And three of them had to do with girls and two of them had to do with a Camaro.

Joe Terry: Yeah! But they all had to do with football because I really wanted to play football. So I write down these five goals. Never think anything about it. I finish high school, go on to play college football, and then have a very short stint in the NFL.

I get cut from the Seattle Seahawks. It was middle of October, 1987. The player personnel director comes into the locker room and says, "Hey Terry, coach wants to see you. Bring your playbook." Everybody knows what that means.

We're walking down the hallway. This is in Kirkland, Washington, where the facility was. Chuck Knox was the coach. I walk into the head coach's room. He's got this big leather chair. He's sitting back, smoking a cigar. He says, "Terry, sit down. We're going to have to let you go today. We're grateful, thank you for your contribution to the team, but you're just not making it."

I said, "Hey coach, I really want to stick in the NFL. I want to play in the NFL. How do I do this? Where do I need to improve?"

He chews on that cigar and says, "Terry, you're one hell of a linebacker. You're just not good enough to be in the NFL."

This isn't a story where I go back and work on my craft and go against all odds. I tried to get another tryout with an NFL team, had one, it didn't work out. I had to move on and find my greatness elsewhere.

But I come home from being cut. I go to my house and my mom has a box of all my stuff because I'm moving out. I start going through it and I pull out this poster—Perceived Self, Ideal Self. And within the poster are the five goals.

All five goals came true.

Lee Levitt: You achieved those goals.

Joe Terry: All five goals. The last one—and I'm 21 years old at this point—was to play in the NFL. And I said, how did I achieve all of my dreams? Just an average kid.

I'm like, this stuff really works. So I went on a journey from that point forward. If I can do this, this is available to anybody who wants it. I went on this journey of understanding and optimizing human potential—personal, business, and professional.

I went all in on a book called Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.

Lee Levitt: Sure. That just came out, right? In the twenties.

Joe Terry: Yeah, in 1912. And I went on this journey, searching for what are the keys and how can I optimize it in myself and others. That led me to sales—I was very successful in sales, then into sales leadership, which I was really successful at. And when you met me, that was my first CEO gig at Corporate Visions.

Because I wanted to take these concepts and build a company the same way. Anybody can do anything they want. There's this phrase in A Course in Miracles that says, "All God's creatures are special and none of God's creatures are special." Which means I'm no different than you, Lee. You're no different than me. We're no better than one another. But there's something very special about you. And my job as a leader, if we're working together, is to find that and help you flourish there.

We've all got that in us. That's the evolution of Joe. And that's where I come to today.

Lee Levitt: You know, that's the longest answer to "Who is Joe Terry" we've had on the podcast so far. Most people just go, "I'm not really sure."

That's awesome, Joe. And you had the self-awareness that when your cigar-chewing head coach said "you're fired, you're not good enough for the NFL," you didn't take it personally. You just took it as input—"I'm going to evaluate where I go from here."

Joe Terry: Right. And I wanted it my whole life, so it got me to a point. But this is the elite of the elite of the elite. Back then, I didn't think he was right. I thought I could still play. I look back now and he was right. I was fringe. I got there because I wanted to get there so bad. I got there because I worked really hard and I learned, I studied the game. I knew the game. I physically wasn't at the level you needed to be, but I knew the game so well I could watch it unfold and get there quicker than others because I knew what was happening.

But he was right.

Lee Levitt: What took you from being an active participant to being a leader of others? What was that shift for you?

And by the way, between then and now you've done some serious work on this. This isn't just "hey, Joe wants to be a leader." You published a book about leadership and about surrendering and about action traps and all sorts of common sense things that—if common sense were common, the world would be in a much better place.

I have a friend, Bob Brennan, who I competed with in the early days of the internet. At one point he was CEO of Iron Mountain. He said, "Hey Lee, this doing more with less stuff is bullshit. I'm telling my teams do less with less. Pick the few things that really make the boat go faster." Your action trap conversation is in that same ballpark—let's focus on the things that matter.

Joe Terry: Right. And what you said—I hope the listeners heard it—common sense is not common.

In all of my life, I've thought of myself as average, and therefore I had to execute on the basics better. That's what my mindset was growing up. I have to do the basics at a world-class level and that will get me to the world-class level. I don't have to find the silver bullet or the hack. If I just consistently execute on the basics, the results will come.

Lee Levitt: Well, Don Miguel Ruiz is pretty straightforward. Do four simple things: Be impeccable with your word. Don't take anything personally. Don't make assumptions. And always do your best—and your best may vary from day to day.

Joe Terry: Absolutely. And your best for that day—that is a surrender moment. You're surrendering to all those expectations. You're like, I can only give the best that I have and I'm going to surrender to that. Be the best I can be in the now, in this moment.

Lee Levitt: Surrender is letting go of others' expectations? Or surrender is letting go of pressure? It's your phrase, Joe. How do you talk about surrender? What does surrender mean to you?

Joe Terry: So if you go to the core of what surrender is—if you and I think about the way we operate, you can only operate from one plane at a time. And there's two planes from which we operate. There's an ego plane where you're operating from ego. And there's a love plane, where you're operating from your heart—the universe, whatever you believe that to be, gratitude.

You can only operate from one or the other. You can't operate from both at the same time.

So to surrender from the highest level is to surrender ego, fear, and scarcity.

Surrender to lead is surrender fear, ego, scarcity, and lead from a mindset of love, abundance, and gratitude. Because when you come from that place, that's the place from which you were born. That's the light in which you were given. That is the purest sense of you as a human being.

And you can never be wrong from there.

Lee Levitt: Right. And then over time, the four-year-old gets that beaten out of them.

Joe Terry: Exactly. 100%. We have to force ourselves back into that mindset.

Surrender is not weakness—it's strength. You're saying, I'm coming into this situation with Lee. And boy, Lee and I don't agree at all. This is going to be a tense conversation.

So I can come from a place of ego, fear—I'm afraid I'm not going to get what I want. I am the superior. My division's better. There's only so much of the pie and I've got to make sure I get it. And Lee is keeping me from that.

Or I come in and I'm like, you know what? There's plenty for everyone. I'm grateful to have this conversation with Lee. I'm going to come from a place of heart. I'm going to really understand. I'm going to let him open up and tell me where he's coming from so I can make a connection and understand where we align.

So that's surrendering.

Lee Levitt: That's awesome, Joe. That perspective—from a leader, it becomes servant leadership. From a sales standpoint, the origin of the word "to sell" means to give. And so many salespeople take rather than give.

Do you walk in and your customer represents a bag of groceries for you? As opposed to, I'm here to help that customer achieve their strategic business objectives.

Joe Terry: Right.

Lee Levitt: Did you run across someone that epitomized this for you as a leader?

Joe Terry: No. Again, it's part of the evolution. In writing this book, Surrender to Lead, Jessica and I went through three writers—because the concepts were just coming out. The results equation: Purpose, strategy, and culture equals results. You get clarity, alignment, and accountability around your purpose, your strategy, and your culture, and you will deliver extraordinary results.

But what was missing was the vein that ran through it. These writers were just not getting the heart part of the equation that Jessica and I were looking for.

Finally I said to Jessica, I'm out. I just don't want to write another business book that goes through these concepts. I want to come with our experiences and what we learned in this process. And if we can't do that, I'm out.

And what she did is she said, "I'm going to write it."

Lee Levitt: Well, she was coming from a different place than you were. You were coming from this gradual arc, up and to the right. She was dealing with a lot of pain—separation, divorce, alcoholism. A very different story.

Joe Terry: Right. We were coming at it from different directions and that wasn't coming through. We needed to get this to the readers in the right way. Some people are going to read this book and they're going to think it's crap. And some people are going to read it and say, "Oh my gosh, you wrote this book for me."

Getting back to your question—how did it come about? It was an evolution of the servant leader. What's the core? And it came to us when we were writing this book. It's surrender.

You have to do that in order to lead from a place of love, gratitude, and abundance. If you don't, you can't. And we said over time, that wins. You can get short-term results with the stick. 100%. But it is not sustainable. There is a cost.

I wish I knew this earlier in my career because it would have released—I would fade in and out of this surrendered leader. I was right there with the quarter ending, "Hey, let's go, let's sell." I've let go more people than I care to. I always did it with love, gratitude, and abundance, but I wish along that journey I would have been able to say, "I'm going to go into this conversation with Suzanne. Let me understand what she's going through." As opposed to, "You're not hitting the number. It's pretty cut and dry."

Lee Levitt: I did some personal development work years ago, and one of the core tenets of that work is: Complete, whole, and perfect. Telling yourself that you are complete, whole, and perfect as you are. I remind myself of that on a regular basis.

Joe, you were talking about that arc—everybody is just who they are. You see a squeegee man on the street in New York and you go, what's the difference between him and me? I'm driving around in a German sedan and he's hoping to get 50 cents to wash the windshield.

What's the difference? Well, the difference might be that he had a medical expense that caused him to be homeless. He might have taken medicine for something that caused him to be addicted. We tend to look at people who don't look like us and stick our nose up at them. One, that could be us tomorrow. And two, more importantly, they are us.

Joe Terry: Yes. All God's creatures are special. None of God's creatures are special. They are us. We are connected.

Lee Levitt: What this brings up for me, Joe, is that to really be effective—and by being effective, I mean being a servant—you have to be humble. You can't walk into a meeting with an executive and say, "Well, I'm going to show you." I'm here to serve you. I'm here to help you. And I don't have all the right answers. And you don't have all the right answers. As Gerhard Gschwandtner says, let's co-create something.

Joe Terry: That was a tipping point that you came to. Think if the whole world operated from that perspective.

Two points. We show up to give, not to get. Show up—if you can keep that—you show up to the phone call, you show up for your spouse, you show up for your kids, you show up for your team members. Show up to give, not to get.

If you want anything in life, you have to give it away first. You have to give it away. If you ever feel lack in your life—love, money, respect, kindness—you've got to give it out.

Lee Levitt: Go work a soup kitchen line for an hour or a day.

Joe Terry: Yeah. I brought Jessica into the company to be our thought leader at Culture Partners. She is extremely talented. She found her specialness. I told her when we hired her, I'm going to help you build your brand.

So we started this relationship. We're building the company. She was doing thought leadership. This is before we started the book. And then it was going south. It was going south hard. She's really strong-willed. As am I. Very opinionated. We don't always align in our thoughts.

Lee Levitt: Which is great.

Joe Terry: Yeah. And we were going south hard. One night I'm talking to my wife Katie. I remember her face. I'm explaining the situation and she looks at me and just shakes her head. She says, "I've seen this movie before. I know how this plays out, and it doesn't play out well. She's either going to quit or you're going to fire her. That's going to happen. Do you want that to happen?"

I'm like, no, I don't. And she goes, "Well, remember—all God's creatures are special and none of God's creatures are special."

Lee Levitt: Thanks for the coaching.

Joe Terry: I have to think about this differently. Complete, whole, and perfect. I said, I am going to embrace this relationship from a place of love. Because I'm coming into it from a place of ego and fear and scarcity. Like, how dare she say that or think this. That's all my ego.

So I'm going to start engaging differently. And I never said a word. Never said a word. I started engaging with her that way. And over the next three to six months, the relationship did a 180 and became incredible—like it was at the very start.

To the point that she even called me up and she said, "We're back." Because now we were having these great conversations about strategy and what we're going to do next. That's where the book was born.

In the absence of that, if I wouldn't have done that, Lee—no book.

Lee Levitt: No book. No work.

Joe Terry: No Jessica on the Today Show. No Jessica on CNBC, CNN. None of that would have happened. And that would have been on me. That's mine. That I own. That was me surrendering to my ego.

Lee Levitt: So Joe, here's a question for you. You took it on yourself to make that change. You identified what you wanted to be different, how you wanted to show up differently in the relationship. Did you consider having a conversation with her about that? Or did you just want to do it? Did you want to be in action or did you want to be in conversation about it?

Joe Terry: I needed to do this from my heart. I didn't say, "Hey Jessica, now I'm going to start showing up from a different place." I said, look, I need to control what I can control.

In our book we talk about experiences shape beliefs. Your beliefs drive your actions. And actions create results. That's the results pyramid. So I said, I can't control her actions or how she feels, but what I can control is the experience I create for her.

I just started doing it. I'm going to show up differently for her and create new experiences. I'm going to do it from a place in my heart. This isn't manufactured. I'm going to do it from a place in my heart.

And over time I started to create these experiences. It started shaping her beliefs. Her actions changed towards me. It was incredible. All of a sudden we're back in the groove, talking about strategy, executing. It was great.

So the answer is I let it unfold organically through the experiences I created.

Lee Levitt: Many people struggle with "I want things to be different." And so the first question is, well, why don't you do something about it? What do I do? Here you go.

Joe Terry: And this is where the SHIFT framework came from. I said I have to own this. There was part of me that wanted to believe that I would see a shift in the other person as a result. It's like, see, you can impact others if you create a different experience for them.

Lee Levitt: Is that ego? Or is that "I'm going to try this and see what happens"? Or is it "This is who I am and if I get specific results, great. And if I get other results, great"?

Joe Terry: I was at a place where my wife said, "I've seen the movie. Do you want the movie to change or not?" And I'm like, okay, that means I have to look at this differently. So I'm going to put all the onus on me.

In the SHIFT framework we say stop—that's the S. Stop fighting reality. The reality is this relationship is going south. I can continue to fight it or not. Stop fighting what is.

Then the next part in the framework is the H. There's a part of you that says, look, reality's reality. I'm going to stop fighting it. I'm also going to have faith. And I don't mean God faith. You're going to have faith that this is going to work out the way it should for the right reasons. You have to believe in that.

And this is where it came to me. I have to identify how I'm showing up with her. That's the I—identify what's mine.

Lee Levitt: This is where it gets real. I've got to take a look at myself and say, no, really, what's going on? Who am I being?

Joe Terry: And I'm like, Joe, you're being an asshole. You're being an asshole as a result of your ego. Identify that.

And then from that is the F—free yourself from the fear. Understand, why am I being an asshole? I was like, wow, I'm afraid of A, B, and C. Okay, that's not helping. I free myself from that.

Lee Levitt: So in this case, was it you were afraid of being wrong? Or you were afraid of—what was the fear?

Joe Terry: The fear was that I had a path I wanted to go down and she would disrupt that path. I had a belief structure. And it's like, nope, I believe this. You believe that. You're wrong. I'm right.

Lee Levitt: Two strong-willed people.

Joe Terry: I didn't want to be open to maybe I'm not right. And the last thing—the T in the SHIFT framework—is take action. So my take action was, okay, I'm going to lead from a place of love, gratitude, and abundance with this relationship.

And it completely shifted the whole thing.

Lee Levitt: That's awesome. As you were talking, it reminded me of the Fifth Agreement. Don Jose Ruiz, Don Miguel's son, wrote the Fifth Agreement. And the Fifth Agreement is ultimately about love. The Fifth Agreement specifically is: be skeptical, but be open to listening.

Don't take everything at face value. And by the way, I'm totally mangling it because it is so much deeper than this. I present it as an intellectual conversation. It's not. It's so much deeper. But the intellectual version is don't take things at face value. Question what you hear. Question what you think. Question what's going on.

Because what you're seeing at face value isn't always the case. It's not that you and Jessica were both assholes. It's that you both really were committed to doing something wonderful.

Joe Terry: Right. And look what I could have screwed up.

Lee Levitt: I could be talking to someone else right now, Joe.

Joe Terry: Totally. 100%. And we don't have a bestselling book on USA Today.

Lee Levitt: Yikes.

Joe Terry: Yeah. That's huge.

Lee Levitt: What an unbelievable set of experiences. And you're now bringing that to organizations—helping large and mid-sized companies understand there is a different way of being, not of doing. This is not a management style. This is a belief system. This is an in-the-gut belief system. Because you can't pay this lip service.

Joe Terry: No. It shows up so bad if you fake it. And in the Four Agreements, the beauty of the Four Agreements is it's a very simple concept. It's the same that we do for companies.

The simple concept is, look, we drive results for your company by activating change within your company. Whatever change that is. We start with results. The result is what you want to achieve. You've got to make a change in your company to get to this result.

We create clarity, alignment, and accountability throughout the whole entire organization around the purpose—why does your company exist? Your strategy—we take three strategy drivers that are going to drive your business. And then the shifts that your people need to make—behavioral shifts in order to execute on those. And that's encompassed in the culture. And then there's a result you want to achieve.

So creating clarity, alignment, and accountability around your purpose, your strategy, your culture to drive extraordinary results. We do that.

But the framework on the front end of that is just what you articulated. It's how you show up. It's how each employee shows up for one another. It's how they show up for their manager and their manager shows up for them. That's the vein that runs through. That's the Nvidia chip inside that runs the whole thing.

We can control the experiences we create for one another. Because those experiences shape a belief, which drives an action, which creates a result. And so the framework is a very simple framework. And it's got to be, because it's got to create clarity, alignment, and accountability in the whole company.

Lee Levitt: And so, Joe, this is not about doing more.

Joe Terry: No, absolutely not. We get in the room with the CEO and his or her entire executive team. And we say, "What's the top three objectives the company's trying to achieve?" And they're like, "Oh, everybody knows it."

We go around the room and they don't know it. They're all different.

And we're like, look, you've got to make this simple. Back to the beginning of the conversation—executing on the foundation of the basics. It's not doing more. It's actually streamlining it to those things that move the needle.

We go in there and they have 15 different objectives and 25 values that they're trying to live by. This strategy and that strategy. Their culture is this and HR believes this and strategy believes this.

And it's like, you have 5,000 employees and the 12 of you in this room are not aligned on what this company does. How do you expect the 12,000? You're losing the power of those people.

Lee Levitt: Right. They're each pulling that rope in a different direction.

Joe Terry: So it's not about doing more. It's a belief system and a way of showing up. Not taking more action. Not doing more stuff. Not doing more 360-degree listening circle sessions.

Lee Levitt: Right.

Joe Terry: Because you haven't got to the core of the underlying belief structure. We want to run to the action trap so much. We call it the action trap in our book.

If you don't create different experiences and shift the belief structure and know what that is, you can do all the actions you want all day long. You might get a little short burst, but you are not going to get long-term repeatable change in execution and results.

Lee Levitt: So Joe, this podcast is called Thoughts on Selling. And at some point we're going to bridge over into the sales conversation. No, here it is.

Everything you said—if someone wants to be a fabulous, knock-it-out-of-the-park salesperson, and I'll say what that means, just do what we talked about for the last 40 minutes.

When you show up as a servant, when you show up without ego, when you show up in service, when you understand the other person, when you want that other person to be successful, when you're clear on what the mission is—you are in service of the other and you'll be compensated accordingly. But that's not why you do it.

I had Jeff Lipsius on about a year and a half ago. He said, "Lee, the purpose of selling is not selling. It's buying." And I sat with that for a bit. I said, yeah, I get that, Jeff, but let's take it to the next step.

The purpose of selling is not buying. You don't go to a car dealer and buy a car for the purpose of signing on the bottom line. You go because you need transportation. Or you want to take the car to the track. Or you want to go out on a Saturday afternoon cruise. You go for those results. You don't go for the transaction.

The purpose of selling is to help an organization meet its strategic objectives—to give them the tools and resources that they can use to meet their strategic objectives. And when a seller thinks from that perspective of being a servant in that process, selling has to change. The seller has to have visibility on what's going on post-transaction. But more importantly, they have to walk in with a very different mindset.

And that mindset comes from what we've been talking about for the last 45 minutes.

Joe Terry: Yeah, 100%. And to your point—I just want some seller one day to start with, "Hey Joe, what are your top three results you're looking to achieve as a company?"

And I would tell them exactly what it is in bookings, what it is in our client retention, and what it is in EBITDA.

And please tell me how you're going to help me achieve that. Because if not, we're wasting our time.

Lee Levitt: We're done. They don't get the second meeting.

Joe Terry: And you have to come from that place of love, abundance, gratitude, in service to that other person. "Hey, I'm here. I'm grateful to even have this meeting and I'm here in service to them."

From a sales perspective—that was my first job out of college, selling. I've been in sales and marketing my entire career. It never stops. I wish it would sometimes, but it never stops.

And so these apply 100%. You can take the application of this and go into your next meeting with that senior leader you're selling to. Walk them through the process. Ask them these questions:

What is the purpose? What is the purpose of your department, of your team, of your company? What are your strategic drivers? Tell me your three strategic drivers. What beliefs need to shift in your people in order to execute on that? And what's the results you're looking to achieve?

If you just ask them that, you have gold. You can now say, "Here's how I'm going to help you achieve your purpose. Here's where it helps execute on your strategy. Here's the beliefs. And here's how it's going to help you get to the results."

Lee Levitt: And with some preparation, they'll come with a point of view.

Joe Terry: Yes. Once they've got that, it's like, "Here's the uniqueness and how we're going to achieve that for you."

Lee Levitt: Well, nobody cares about uniqueness. Everyone says "we're different because..." And nobody cares about different. It's, are you going to help me achieve my results?

Different is an intellectual conversation. "We're different because we're better than the others." That's not how enterprise buyers buy. They buy based on emotion. What's the risk in saying yes to this person?

Joe Terry: You're right. But again, from a seller perspective, if I had that tool in my toolbox back in the day—walk me through what that looks like. Because generally nobody's asking them that question.

And you are now creating an experience—back to the emotion of the sale. You're creating an experience for that person which is shaping a belief that's going to drive an action to create a result for you.

And you're shaping that belief that nobody else is.

Lee Levitt: There's so much opportunity to improve leadership. There's so much opportunity to improve how professional salespeople interact with customers—how they prepare, how they carry themselves.

I've worked with many owners of small professional services who, as the key salesperson for their business, have this perspective of the salesperson in the plaid jacket and the patent leather shoes smoking a cigar. They don't want to be that person, so they're afraid to sell.

And I tell them, be yourself. Share your passion for what you do.

Joe Terry: Yeah. And that even shows up, AI or not. I saw this article that said agents are going to do all the work for the buyer and they're going to come to you and you're going to get one meeting and they're going to buy.

I remember—you and I have been in this business long enough to know—back in the day, maybe 15 years ago, they said the web is going to create this world where buyers aren't having conversations with salespeople anymore until the very end. That never happened.

But I do believe AI is going to go deeper with that. Still, the salesperson needs to show up and tell the story and understand and connect the dots. Because AI is going to only be able to do so much.

Lee Levitt: Right.

Joe Terry: It's making the buyers more educated. But information is going to be table stakes. Everybody's going to have data. You still have to differentiate here. You have to create emotion—because that's where the buyer is.

Lee Levitt: Right. Business as usual—do nothing—is the default. I'm not going to do anything unless I see a clear benefit to taking the risk of doing something. And is the person sitting across the table from me willing to go along on that ride with me? Do they have the experience? Can they guide me? Can they show me where the potholes are?

I had a CEO at a key account meeting say, "Help me see around corners."

I love that quote. Help me see around corners. Help me to know what I don't know that I don't know.

Joe Terry: Jensen Huang—the CEO of Nvidia—said, "Intelligence is not being able to code and being the smartest person in the room. Intelligence is those people that can see around the corners." And he said, "If you can help me see around corners, you're of high value to me."

Lee Levitt: Joe, this has been a fascinating conversation. We should probably wrap it up because otherwise we'll just go on all night.

Joe Terry: Yeah, we could keep going for hours.

Lee Levitt: This has been fabulous. So where can people find you these days, Joe?

Joe Terry: LinkedIn is probably the best—Joe Terry, Culture Partners, LinkedIn. Our book is surrendertolead.com. And then culturepartners.com. Those are the three places you can find us.

I love to connect with people on LinkedIn. You can go see what I post about. I'm usually posting about what's in my own heart—what I'm dealing with, I put out there. I'm not selling anything. I'm not there to sell. But I'm there to hopefully add some value and give some insight so someone can take that.

Lee Levitt: You know, Joe, I think I sent you a message 10 years ago saying, "I love how you are so authentic when you share." Because you stand out in that respect. Everyone else posts what they think people want to see or what will stroke their ego. You post authenticity. You share from authenticity.

Joe Terry: Thank you. I appreciate that. I share a lot of failures because I want people to learn from them. I've made a lot of mistakes. Getting back to the beginning of this—I just feel like I'm your average person.

Lee Levitt: Our mistakes are not who we are. They're just part of the history—the scars on our hands or on our knees. They're just part of our history. Those mistakes make us stronger and more able to help others.

Joe Terry: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm happy to share that.

Lee Levitt: Joe, what's an ideal client look like for you?

Joe Terry: Anybody that's going through a rapid change, some sort of disruption. They're not getting the results that they want to get and they're looking to understand why and how they can.

We work with a lot of credit unions because they're member-based. Very service-oriented. They don't compete against one another. They tend to be our smaller clients—100 to 200 employees. And we work with the largest companies in the world as well. Petronas, the big energy company in Malaysia, is 58,000 employees.

So we run the gamut. It's any company that's working through change and how to create clarity, alignment, and accountability through their organization.

Lee Levitt: I love it, Joe. I'm so glad we were able to reconnect.

Joe Terry: Yeah, grateful to have been on, Lee. Thank you.

Lee Levitt: Of course. Thanks, Joe. Always a pleasure.

Another deep dive into the topic of sales excellence and the performance mindset. If you found this conversation interesting, I would appreciate it if you would share the podcast with a coworker or two. And to explore this topic in more depth, send me a note through the contact form on podcast.thoughtsonselling.com, or find some time for us to talk at meetasellergroup.com. Thanks.