What a great week! We’re having unseasonably pleasant weather for STL in July, and what fun the MLB Home Run Derby and All-Star game were. Speaking of all-stars, I recently had the privilege of spending a few days at a mutual client with Anthony Iannarino, one of the biggest all-stars in the sales improvement business.
I discovered Anthony about five years ago and couldn’t be more thankful that I did. After stalking him on twitter and reading his valuable daily blog posts, I sent him an email looking to get together. Of hundreds of supposed sales gurus and bloggers, Anthony stood out. Within a month, I brought him in to lead a session for my employer’s (at the time) sales team. Following that, we became friends and I appreciated his support when I launched back into full-time consulting, coaching and speaking in early 2011. Before I knew it, we had become good friends, and I asked him to write the foreword to New Sales. Simplified. If you believe his version, he asked me if he could write the foreword, and he still smiles taking the credit that the book has been such a success 🙂
Fast forward to last fall when a major client of mine was putting together a business development conference. I recommended Anthony to my most senior contact because I truly believed he would bring them tremendous value in his areas of expertise (and because I knew he’d make me look good). Anthony spoke at the conference, hit a home run, and today, like I am, he’s intimately involved in ongoing training and coaching with this company.
A couple of months back, an executive at this company who had just attended separate training sessions conducted by Anthony and me, asked us to jointly create and facilitate a custom two-day workshop, specifically for people in his business area. So after five years of busting each other’s chops on social platforms, promoting the other’s content, and doing podcasts and webinars, we got the chance to formally work together — and all this for a company we love serving and whose mission we greatly respect. What a blast it was working with this brilliant executive and Anthony putting this session together!
While pushing and challenging each other as we prepped the content was fun, my favorite part of all this was getting to watch Anthony in action in front of our client. There are lots of folks who talk at a high-level about creating value, building consensus, and quarterbacking very complex deals through the process, but there are very few who will roll up their sleeves and actually model for you how to do it. I saw it awe as Anthony put these workshop participants through the paces. He not only showed them how to break down very complex sales opportunities, he made them get messy and do it themselves, too. There are only a small handful of people I look to for sales advice, and seeing Anthony share his Level 4 Value Creation and Consensus Building modules in person was a good reminder why he’s at the very top of my go-to sales guru list. If you’re not reading Anthony’s blog or receiving his weekly newsletter, you’re missing out. Learn more by clicking here.
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Curious for your feedback about this potential new offering for individuals:
Anthony and I both reserve a small percentage of our time to coach individual sales producers. For various reasons, we love 1:1 coaching and mentoring. However, our speaking, consulting and travel schedules preclude us from taking on too many individual clients. The results is that there is significantly more demand for individual coaching than either of us can provide. We’ve talked about this extensively and come up with a 13-week subscription-based program that includes our best content, workbooks, weekly video lessons, live web sessions and a full-day in-person workshop led by Anthony Iannarino and me. Here’s my question: For less than the cost of what one of us charges for just one month of personal coaching via telephone, would you pay for this 13-week program that includes everything I just listed? Please write to me; I’d love your thoughts and feedback!
