How To Align Your Life To Your Passion (With Special Guest Merit Kahn)
It’s easy to lose sight of our passion when we “grow up” and get caught in the grind of work and adulting. The most inspiring of people, however, refuse to live meaninglessly and do everything within their power to build a life around that passion. For, Merit Kahn, the founder of Merit-based Business, that passion is inspiring and motivating people to achieve more for themselves. Whether in sales, performing, speaking, training or coaching, Merit brings in her own brand of contagious enthusiasm spiked with a touch of invigorating humor. Sitting down with Chad Burmeister in this episode, she talks about this passion plus her insights on bringing humor to life, the relationship between sales technique and sales technology, and the changes in the world of work-from-home.
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How To Align Your Life To Your Passion (With Special Guest Merit Kahn)
I have a special guest, another Denverite or at least Coloradorite from down the street in Aurora, Colorado. We have Merit Kahn with us from Merit-based Business. She's been in business since 1998. She knows a thing or two. Welcome to the show, Merit.
Thanks for having me.
It’s good to have you here. You're from Chicago. I was born in Madison, Wisconsin. I could recognize that slight where in the Midwest are you from. That's why I asked the question.
I was born in Chicago, raised outside of Manhattan and my New York friends say I have a Chicago accent, my Chicago friends say I talk like a New Yorker. I don't know. I can't win.
When in doubt, move to Colorado because we take everybody. I love to understand a little bit about you. You were born in Chicago, you moved to the East Coast. Think back to college days or the middle of your career. Maybe early or late ‘90s. What were you passionate about? What did you study in college?
I studied Communications. I wanted to be a broadcast journalist which I had one class and we were supposed to read from a teleprompter or something, which I thought was fun. I think I started smiling because there's a camera on. I'm like, “Five people died today in this horrible fire,” and the professor was like, “You may not want to smile during that.” That was when I learned I'm probably not going to be able to do broadcast journalism. I might need to write things, but I don't like the structure. I liked personality. Sales suit me well and now that everything's digital, I do get to read from a teleprompter every once in a while. It's fun.
My friend is an actor and he has to memorize many lines and I was never good at memorization. I'm good at asking questions and figuring out how to solve a Rubik's Cube and that's why I think I landed in sales game too. Communications major, thought about Journalism. I'm curious before that, when you were young, what was your thing? What was the passion that woke you up in the morning to go, “I want to go do?” What was that?
Any type of performing. Cheerleading, plays, singing. I was always in front of an audience. We used to do sleepover shows. My little girlfriends would sleepover and we would perform for our parents. It was definitely wherever there was a microphone or a stage, I was in.
A lot of times we forget when we go through a couple of different jobs in life and then we end up at a certain place and it's like, “What was it that I loved as a kid?” A lot of times I find that when people can connect the dots back to what they're passionate about when they’re a kid then they're living a frictionless life. It becomes easy when it's like, “I wake up and it's fun.” There's no work involved when you follow your dreams and passions.
I couldn't agree with that more. I think that's insightful. In fact, fall 2019, in celebration of my 50th birthday, I wrote, produced and starred in an original one-woman inspiring comedy show which is on C-Suite TV. It was interesting because in writing that, I went through what you were talking about, those early beginnings, like how did I come to do the things that I do now, both personally and professionally and they all started young in some way, shape or form. The whole story that show was about the journey back to who I've always been and it's fascinating.
Even as a cheerleader, it was about inspiring people to see more for themselves, inspiring and motivating people to achieve more. Sales, performing, speaking, coaching, training, all of that was such a natural place for me to land. It was never a question of, “Would I be in sales?” It was more a question of, “What would I sell?” Over the years, I went from selling radio advertising then I landed in sales training, which made perfect sense. I'm selling the fact that I'm helping you be able to sell more and it was a perfect fit.
The journey back. In fact, I talked to Liz Wendling also from Colorado. She said she wore the hat. We're going to be pushing hers on podcasts as opposed to the webinars. We did an exercise and said, “What you can't do is tell your younger self any advice because that's already passed, but try this exercise for a second. You said the journey back.” This was an hour exercise with someone else, probably sure with 30 seconds. Imagine you meet your future self and picture where you're going. Is it in Europe? It doesn't matter. Now you meet your future self and your future self tells you one thing to take back to now.
If you run through that circular exercise and think, “The first time I did it, I was in Greece or the Mediterranean up on a cliff, looking down over water. It was myself, there was a breeze because I had this whole picture. Where's Tracey?” I told my wife that and she's like, “What do you mean where's Tracey?” I said, “Maybe you were shopping at the store or I figured you were out doing something.” I was there looking down on this cliff. Imagine running that exercise and telling yourself. I asked Liz the same thing. I said, “What would you tell yourself now if you went and saw yourself in the future?” Same question for you. What would you tell yourself now if you talked to yourself twenty years from now?
I think my future self would say something along the lines of, “There was always a time to laugh. A little bit more laughter, girl. Lighten up. It's not all serious. Find a way to infuse humor, not just for yourself, but to lighten the mood, to lighten things for other people as well.”
Liz was along the line of, “You did good. You followed your heart.” That was the basis of it.
I think I'm still a work in progress. Even then I was giving myself like, “Here's one more thing you could work on.”
I went to the 50th Super Bowl and I felt like, “That's the halfway point for the NFL.” It was interesting. My grandmother passed away that morning, but it was poetic. It was Grandma Burmeister and it was like, “I get it. I understand.” We had been there and saw her and everything. It was the right timing, but it was like, “I'm on the 50-yard line of life. This is the 50th Super Bowl. My team won, the Denver Broncos.” Technology plus technique equals sales success is the topic. Is good sales technique sabotaged by poor sales technology?
This is one of my new favorite topics. I completed the first season of a podcast called The Smarter Sales Show. It's all about the tech and technique to sell more and stress less. My cohost, Julie Holmes, who's a brilliant savvy sales mind and she comes from the technology side. I came from the technique side. We noticed that we were having these conversations as colleagues and friends. She would call me and say, “What do I put in this email messaging? What should I say about what I do in this offer?” I would always give her what to say and the technique. She would be telling me about these things like how she knew that a prospect was looking at her proposal in that exact moment.
I was like, “How do I do that?” She would tell me about the tech side. All of a sudden, we realized that other people would benefit in eavesdropping on these conversations. I think that coming from the technique side, I have the benefit of understanding the psychology of sales messaging and the buyer mentality. I've studied all of that at length. I'm certified in emotional intelligence and with my major being applying that to sales process. I get all of that, but I'm at a huge disadvantage if I'm up against somebody who also has decent technique, but they know when the prospect is opening the proposal, what page they're looking at, how much time they're spending with it and who they might be sending it to. That's way more intel than what I would have known had I not applied and learned the AI and how important that is in being successful in sales. It's not good enough anymore to be good only at technique. Too many of your competitors are savvy with the tech side and they're the best.
Life Passion: Find a way to infuse humor, not just for yourself, but to lighten things up for other people as well.
Many years ago, InsideSales.com out of Utah was the rage of the day. Ken Krogue and Dave Elkington, Ken was a military guy and their strategist. He's a deep strategist and their prediction was, “At some point, Inside Sales will run the sales game and field sales reps will be parachuted in.” At that time, it was such a bold prediction like, “Are you kidding me? I have the technique. I know how to read the person and their body language. There's no day where that entry-level, $50,000 a year person will have any threat over my $250,000 a year job.” You fast forward and we're at many years and people have now worked at home and the $250,000 a year person is being forced to learn the technique, tactics and technology of the $50,000 a year person and they both converge.
All different ballgame now.
There's a book that's out there called Beat the Bots. I wrote the book AI for Sales. I met the author of Beat the Bots and we said, “On the next version 2.0, we should merge them together and that way you read the front and then you flip it and you read all the technologies and they're all in one book.” I thought that would be good. What's more important, good technique or good technology? That's an interesting arm wrestle.
It is an arm wrestle. I don't know that there's necessarily one is a better ratio than the other. I think they're equally important. I say that because with Julia and I being a good example. She knows when somebody might be looking at her proposal as an example. If it's not well-written and well-put together, if she didn't take her prospect through the technique of getting them into that emotional buying state prior to presenting the proposal, all of that, she's at a disadvantage by not understanding the psychology and the sales process part. I'm at an equal disadvantage if I'm trying to follow-up at the magical right time, but she knows exactly when to make that call to say, “I was thinking about you.” They're like, “That's crazy. We were looking at your proposal.” They're both important. That's one example of what tech can bring as a tool for professional salespeople to up their game.
I went into a little app called Crystal Knows, I pulled up your LinkedIn profile. It says, “Merit is likely to thrive in an unstructured environment,” makes sense. You've been in business since 1998 on your own, “and tends to act on intuition over logical analysis.” I'm sending you an email, “Be encouraging and casual, use less than five words. Thanks for the advice and the subject. Don't be too direct.” It doesn't matter. Sometimes, it's like, “You're a Pisces. Therefore, you are this.” Sometimes it's not a 100% match, but I'd also rather be powered with the information than not.
If you have the information and it's layered on top of your strong sales mindset, your strong sales skillset, then it works for you. If you don't have that information, you still have good technique maybe, but your competition may have a lot more insight. If the technique is the same, they're going to win.
It's a tie and it depends on the motion. It depends on the type of sale, the type of buyer, but at the end of the day, if you're not learning about technologies, then you'll be at a disadvantage. What I'm seeing though, the antithesis of that is that because of the technologies, the things that we offer that automate email, automate social outreach, pull data on an intent basis. “This particular company is above the threshold on looking for lead generation.” I should call that company instead of the other 99 companies. All of that becomes automated. It puts a little more stress on the technique side because the tools are going to be simpler, even though they sound sophisticated, and be built into your workday. The technique needs to be enhanced because now the rep who comes in and says, “Let me show you my product. Now, I'm going to show you these.” “No. Time out. I don't need that. I need you to do deeper discovery and have an intellectual conversation.”
I hadn't thought about it like that, but because the technology is good and it allows you to do more outreach and more automated communication, you're getting out there a lot more than we used to be able to do in the old days when it was a phone call. I remember business when there was no email.
I used to send a physical letter. I was in Selling Power Magazine in about 1997. I used to send a calling card out to the prospect and say, “I'll give you 25 minutes on a calling card,” because it was $0.25 a minute at that point. I would spend it out of my own pocket and say, “I'll give you 25 minutes on this card. All I ask in return is can I get 25 minutes on your calendar?” The hit rate worked out well.
Some of those old ways, but you do have to keep your technique fresh. I can remember making calls and saying to people, “I'm calling long distance.” That was a reason they should come to the phone quickly. Imagine, if I was teaching people to say that now, that I'd be laughed out of the room, but because you're communicating, you're having many more conversations that are happening simultaneously. They're happening with different areas in the country with different types of people. You're not going to use the tool that you shared where you could learn a little bit more about me. You're not doing that every single time. The messaging that you use, your technique in those communications is important to get that right. That speaks for what you're saying, which is, “Technique may be more important now than it had been before we could have all these conversations.”
It's counterintuitive, it's one of those things where you think of it on the surface and say, “Maybe you’ve got to spend a lot more time on the tools.” I've been in it for 2.5 years. The car is going to drive itself whether it's email, social. Imagine if you could line up the right personality to the right buyer personality who comes to your website or in an outbound motion. I'm a firstborn driver and maybe I shouldn't be aligned with another firstborn driver because we might butt heads too much. If I was aligned with the proper person, they'd be like, “This is amazing. You talk to me exactly how I want to be talked to.” How do we, as sellers, learn about these technologies and tools?
Outside of reading your show and mine, I think for me, what I've had to train myself to do was to think, “Is there an app for that or a zap for that?” That's a question I've learned to ask myself in a myriad of different situations. In the old days where I used to try to figure something out myself or I would be like, “I have all these emails to send out and I would do that one at a time.” Now, I sit there and anytime I'm doing some sales task, I ask or I'll Google it, or I'll ask my other smart sales colleagues, “Is there an app that does what I need?” If there is, great, I've learned something new. There usually is because what I do is not that extraordinarily different than anybody else in the sales industry. I may not be exposed to that particular tool. Asking myself that has me go out and look for new things.
Zapier is a great tool that I use. It connects my surveys to my CRM. When I do a webinar or I'll have a survey, it will ask people questions because of the way that they answer certain questions. They will be ported to my database, flagged in certain ways that lets me follow up with them. All of that is possible because I took the time to understand what's possible with the technology. I could be the best in the world at sales technique, but if I don't know what's on somebody's mind after they've been to a presentation or a training class or bought one of my digital products. If I don't know how to ask them what they want more of or what their other needs might be or set them up in a series of automated sequences and messages to follow up with them, it doesn't matter how good I am at the sales conversation. I'm not going to be having the right conversations with the right people in the first place.
It's wild how the technology, to your point. The other side of technology is post-sale. A lot of people think about, “How do I get more top of funnel?” How do you expand the relationships with people you're already working with? Similarly, you can apply technology too. There's even tech that'll automatically record a voicemail and voicemail drop it. For example, we've got about 100 customers deployed on this one platform. About once a week, one person out of the 100, they'll disconnect between LinkedIn and the platform. Usually, it's because they have their phone, their laptop, another computer. They have ten places where LinkedIn is logged in. LinkedIn goes, “That doesn't look right.” They disconnect 3 or 4 of the connections.
The process is manually look at it, go down the list, send an email, copy and paste. I challenged the team last week and said, “We have a book. That's what our product does, a voicemail automated drop.” What if we set the Zapier to connect and that becomes a trigger, it puts that person into the sequence, it sends an email, “It looks like you've been disconnected. Here's the little three-minute video and then a voicemail drop.” That says, “It's Chad again, I noticed you became this.” Think of the levels of automation. Sometimes that driverless car can run into a building.
You have to be a little bit careful. That's where my good friend, Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell where I used to work is like, “Be careful what you wish for because quickly, the zeros and ones, the computer hasn't seen all the variations yet.” It will be interesting to see how that plays out. Think about the last couple of quarters in 2020, work from home is the new word and people are like, “What's WFH?” I used to have it on my fake virtual bookshelf behind me and one of my customers put it on there and I'm like, “That's cool.” People would always look at it, squint and go, “What is that?” It's like, “Work from home.” Now everyone knows that term. In sales training business, I would think you're on planes, trains and automobiles. What did that do? How did you pivot?
I've had a home office since 1998. That part of it wasn't a big shift for me, but most of my work was on large stages at large conferences where I would do an opening keynote or a breakout session. That was a revenue stream as well as a marketing opportunity. Every time I would be on a stage, I would get a coaching client or a consulting project, another stage to be on, a training contract. In a nanosecond, not only was my revenue stream gone, but a huge marketing avenue was eliminated. I did what many of my colleagues did in that time was initially like, “What can I offer? How can I help?” I would do a lot of free coaching and a lot of webinars.
I stopped and I thought, “Let me observe,” because most of my professional speaking colleagues were taking what they did on a stage and trying to do it in a virtual platform. I took the perspective of what if I looked at this as a new opportunity? If I looked at it as a blank canvas to say, “This is an opportunity to look and see the things that I did like about the way that I went to market, the business model that I had. What worked? What didn't work about that model? Now, if I had a blank canvas, what would I now create from a fresh slate moving forward into a world where virtual will always be available, but maybe the live events won't be available in the ways that I was used to it?”
Instead of trying to wait this out to get back to what I was comfortable with, let me make myself a little bit uncomfortable. For me, my sweet spot is not the technology. I have learned an incredible amount. I've joked with my friends and say, “I'm in virtual business school. I'm getting my VBS.” I created a video studio. I've learned editing software. I've got automated systems in my marketing and digital offers and I launched the podcast. I've been busy and I love what is coming out of this new creation, but it came from this mindset of, “You don't want to pivot, take what I was doing and do it differently. I want everything that I'm doing, that I've done in business.” I have the expertise that I've built out over twenty-plus years, but how I deliver that is a whole new world and it's exciting. It's fun again. I'm excited.
My good friend, Jamie Shanks does social sales training. He's from the Great White North, a little further north of us there in Canada. We were on a ski trip in February 2020 and then everything happened. He went and took out a big loan for the business thinking, “We're in for hurt.” They had a lot of big transactions that said, “We're going to cancel.” They changed their verbiage and their contract that added government shutdown, pandemic, all the language in the Ts and Cs of the MSA that said, “Once you sign, we're going to deliver. It doesn't matter if I'm standing on a stage or I'm talking to 500 people in a web meeting, it's almost the same thing.”
Life Passion: You can have the best sales technique, but if you don’t know what’s on people’s minds, you’re not going to have the right conversations with the right people.
Now, I talked to him and he said, “I may not get on a plane until the end of 2021 and my business is growing faster and better than it was when we were doing everything in person.” It's interesting when you have the abundance mindset. One thing I'll share with you. SalesClass is where we're going to start publishing. We've gotten over 3,000 on-demand videos, Sandler Training, all the big ones then Grasso that does social. Everybody we've asked and said, “Would you like to contribute? We're going to be selling subscriptions to people at a low cost so they can access Netflix for sales content.”
You go in, you're configuring and you say, “On a scale of 1 to 10 mindset, I'm a 2. Skillset, I'm a seven. Career, I'm a ten. I don't need anything.” Based on how you answer these eight questions, it will give you, “Here are your three courses that you might want to take.” It doesn't say you have to. We're in a world where it's free, whatever you want to do. You can watch these three videos or you can listen to these three podcasts.” Based on what you do and how long you watch, the system gets smarter and over time, like Netflix, starts to say, “I guess Merit doesn't like those long 1.5-hour classes, we're going to serve up the five-minute class.”
The other part of it is, “What do you do when you get there?” This might be valuable for you. A couple of years ago, I attended a life coaching class. I got invited and normally, I wouldn't do it, but I'm like, “Let's learn.” It’s 150 life coaches and it was a four-day in person. They would get deep in the minds of people within 10 or 12 minutes and their whole life would flash in front of their eyes like, “I've been doing it wrong. I need to change.” When he said, “We're going to take this to an online world. Good news, Chad, the four-day onsite you paid for $3,000, we're going to do a 21-day with the CMO of Harley and all these people.” At first, I was like, “It sounds dumb. I can do free webinars anytime I want. Why would I pay you the $3,000? Good try.” They came back to me and said, “We understand where you come from. Here's what we're going to do. We'll do the 21 days and when we can get back live, you will still do the live class and you can bring a friend.” I was like, “Now I get two in the future and I get 21 days.” The first day, that's the litmus test, “What's this going to be like?” He said, “We’ve got 150 people in the audience. Who wants to be coached by me?” Like he did in person, he promoted that person. He goes, “Let all those 150 vanish into the distance and then looked in the person's eyes and started to take a breath. Let me ask you some questions.”
Everybody has resistance when you're doing a one-on-one. You push on my hand, I push on yours and it's resistance. The 150 viewers have no resistance. That's the magic of the virtual room is that you can have the person with resistance, but they volunteered so they asked for the coaching. All the other people that get to witness it, start clapping in the room. They're like, “This is the most magical webinar I've ever been part of.” Think about that when you're doing your webinars, that audience participation on a one-on-one and say, “Don't worry about all those people.” That was the biggest magic takeaway from the pivot online. That's what we're trying to do at SalesClass. We may have had our first one and I wasn't able to attend. I hope it went something like that. Let's go for two more questions. There are still some non-techie people out there. What advice do you give to them? It sounds like you've made a lot of moves with automation. From what I understood, you could consider yourself a non-techie person. What was your hack?
First of all, I blocked out some time to learn. I'm knee-deep in the editing software because I'm recording a lot of videos in my new studio. Before I go and outsource that because I don't want to be doing video editing for too much time, it's not the best use of my time. I want to understand it enough so that when I hand it off to somebody, I can talk intelligently about it. I know a little bit about how I want them to look and feel. I think video tutorials and setting up some time, giving myself permission to take the time to learn and for me, because I could go way down a rabbit hole and learn and I have to be able to say, “For a defined period of time, I'm going to learn this thing. If I'm setting aside 45 minutes in this window, these are the three things that I want to take away from this learning.” Maybe I'll go back and I'll do another learning session. There's so much out there with YouTube and whatever you're trying to learn. Twelve other people have already not learned it, but they've synthesized what they've learned, summarized it and put it into a video. The other thing is I always watched those videos on double speed.
The main thing was giving myself permission to not be perfect at it right away, but to also take time to immerse myself in the learning phase, which I think was a mindset block. I came from the school of thought that was, you sell during selling hours and after selling hours, you can do paperwork or learn things or travel. I had to reorient my brain around, “This is part of what I do as a business owner. I have to learn this software, this technology.” I'm going to do it during my selling hours because my health and wellbeing is important to me. Also, as the business owner, I can't be good for any of this, if I'm not taking time to exercise and relax and decompress.
Airborne Express and FedEx where my first two jobs. They had this thing called calls and hours, the same thing as advertising. I'm sure yours were probably called something slightly different than that. At Airborne, it was intense. It was six meetings a day for 30 minutes each. What you would do to cheat the system is go to someone's office, grab a card and now you met with them. I got to FedEx, they became more sophisticated and they had geocoding on your phone. What reps would do is, “I'm going to sit in the parking lot for 30 minutes, get the card because they moved it from 6 up to 12 a day. A trucking VP from another trucking company that we merged with at that time became the boss and he was all about calls and hours and brought that in.
Similar to you, I always had that idea of, “Get out of the office, you can't be here.” If you're in the office, you better be on the phone and carved the other times out on the weekends or at night. I would even go as far as to say, if you're a quota-carrying seller, not an owner of a business, you are the CEO of your own territory at the end of the day. They should teach me that a long time ago. If you're the CEO of your own territory, then sharpening the saw from time to time, revenue equals frequency, that's the number of repetitions, times competency.
If you only can do competence on the weekends for half-an-hour, you're not going to get that equation up to where it needs to be. I think with nowadays tools and tech, the good news is, “I can have the email be automated. The social can be automated, the ditch.” All of that time sucks stuff, you can get smart about and now it reinvests your hours in learning and education. That goes back to the question, “What's more important, technique or tools?” You're going to see technique. The other thing that's interesting is who wins in the AI world for selling, men or women?
I don't have any research on that, but given that we've established that I speak from intuition rather than logically, I think my gut would have said men maybe have the edge on the technology piece, but there are many tech-savvy women these days. There are many more girls going into STEM and I'm not sure that my automatic old pattern of thinking would apply now.
Think of this, if you know there are 5 to 7 different personality types, emotional intelligence, depending on which one you use, there's different DISC and all those things. If you could segment people into those personalities and then you could write an email or a social or a voicemail or all the different communications, do a video. Instead of being, “Merit, this is Chad, we're the best in pipeline development. I wanted to get some time on your calendar so that I could offer you my pipeline development. It's amazing.” Versus now enter EI, Emotional Intelligence, and you map it to the right personality, now you can get a heck of a lot smarter. I'd rather have someone in super-powered EI, the emails that go out from my whole team versus trying to say, “You guys write the emails.” That's not their super power. I'm getting a feeling that it’s going to be a good run for women in sales. That's my prediction. We close the pay gap here in the next couple of years as AI enters the scene. Let's talk podcast, The Smarter Sales Show. I heard you say, “Sell more, stress less.” Holly Duckworth, do you know her?
I do know Holly.
Holly is local in Colorado as well. She's coming over with her husband to the fire pit and Arjun from C-Suite is coming to the fire pit. We may need to expand the audience, maybe if you're around, we'll have you to the fire pit and we can do The Smarter Sales Show recording.
I love it. That sounds great.
Tell us about it. What is The Smarter Sales Show?
It is the tech and technique. We recorded eleven episodes in season one and then at the twelfth episode was our greatest hits album. We took a sales challenge that we either experienced ourselves or we know it’s a common thing. Every week we would get together and discuss what's a tech solution to that challenge? What's a technology solution? You had mentioned things about it's one thing to talk about the top of the funnel and getting more prospects in, but also how do you grow existing accounts? That's been my sweet spot over the course of my career is helping entrepreneurial customer clients of mine, people who sell custom-engineered solutions, creative solutions, not off the shelf.
You can't put it in your shopping cart online or in a store. It requires an expert to explain it, put it together properly and deliver it. That's my ideal client. A lot of that work is about how do you grow an existing business. There are land accounts and expand accounts. We did a whole episode on referrals and introductions to grow your business. Julie Holmes had some great things to offer about using video testimonials and how to plug that into different social media sites and how to use that from a sales tech perspective. I talked about how do you set up that conversation beforehand so that when the time is appropriate, when your client is happy and you've delivered on your original promise. You then can have an easy natural conversation about who else they might introduce you to or what other kinds of challenges they might be facing that you also may be able to add value and help them with.
How would they find that? Can you Google it or where do you go?
You can Google it. We have a website, TheSmarterSalesShow.com. It's also on all your favorite podcast channels. We also are on the C-Suite Network. There are a lot of options.
If you could leave our audience with one thought now, a recommendation, what would that be?
Life Passion: If you want to be more influential with other people, the number one thing you want to focus on is to understand what has influence over you.
If you want to be more influential with other people, the number one thing you want to focus on is understanding what has influence over you. Whether that's getting a good understanding of your emotional intelligence, your sales mindset or understanding where you are in terms of your comfort level with technique or technology. Get clear about what is influencing you because you cannot be more influential with others until you understand what influences you.
You gave me a huge idea for SalesClass and assessment. I can see it. They fill out the form and answer these questions. We do it with the AI, but I think that's the new feature add-on of the day.
I might already have something like that so we can tag team on it.
Merit with Merit-based Business, I appreciate you joining. I hope everybody has taken away a point or two. I certainly have the journey back. Remember, you can go to the future, meet yourself, then come back and tell yourself what to do. You'll probably get many years out. You can be wherever you want to be. Tools, technology technique, make sure you're focused on all three. Thanks for joining. Merit, it’s great to have you. We are out.
Important Links:
LinkedIn – Merit Kahn
C-Suite Network – The Smarter Sales Show
About Merit Kahn
Merit Kahn (formerly Gest), CSP, is the Founder of Merit-based Business, author of Myth Shift: Challenging The Truths That Sabotage Success and creator of The Merit Method: Sales Mastery for Life program... and... writer, producer and star of the one-woman inspirational comedy show, "Book of Merit".
With more than 20 years of sales, sales management, coaching, training, consulting, writing and speaking experience, Merit has worked with thousands of clients across multiple industries with one goal in mind... grow sales and influence.
She is certified in Emotional Intelligence and earned the highest designation in The National Speakers Association, one held by less than 12% of professional speakers worldwide, The Certified Speaking Professional, CSP.
And, as a Certified Virtual Presenter, you can relax knowing that Merit's programs can be delivered in whatever format you need. Large audiences, small group interactions... live or virtual... Merit delivers relevant content wrapped in humor and laced with interaction.
Need a little comic relief during the meeting? Merit performs stand-up comedy to unwind... because that's not stressful at all!
Your attendees invest their energy, time and money to go to the event. They deserve a high energy, content rich, engaging speaker who understands how to capture attention, inspire people into action and make 'em laugh.
Whether she is on stage with thousands or working with a small executive team, her presentation style is a blend of content, connection & comedy.
All of Merit's work is specifically designed for each unique client.
Merit's work experience and certifications in both Emotional Intelligence and cultural transformation give her a unique perspective for hiring, onboarding, selling and retaining top talent.
Prior to forming Merit-based Business, Merit was the Senior VP of Sales for a nationwide sales training organization and the youngest General Sales Manager for a start-up radio station in the country's third largest market.
In her various roles as a business owner, trainer, coach, consultant and keynote speaker, she has worked with CEOs, business owners, entrepreneurs, sales management teams and professionals across a wide variety of industries including financial services, manufacturing, engineering, professional services, technology and even pest control.
A true adventurer, Merit pulls business and life lessons from her experiences backpacking around the world on her own, bungee jumping, sky diving, ice climbing, scuba diving, paragliding and crashing. She's likely the only person on the planet who's broken a left foot in Israel and a right leg in Croatia, but somehow she's walked away from both with inspiring messages that enable people to create new possibilities in business and life.
