Well, happy birthday, Mark Frimston. There you go. That's a real life shout out coming to you straight from the stoic sofa. Happy birthday, Mark. And yeah, I do.

Have you got for me? It's the 9th of Feb. Listen.

I'm going to help you with something there. Okay? little bit of curly chops, a little bit Marcus Aurelius. We have the power to hold no opinion about a thing and not to let it upset our state of mind, for things have no natural power to shape our judgments. Wow. There's loads in there. I'm excited to get into this. I did a conversation with Robin Drake. Had or did?

I did. I did one. I did one and it was a good one. I had a conversation with Robin Drake, who was ex FBI and he gave me some advice and he said that when you are having a conversation with somebody, a lot of the time you say something like, I've just got back from Marbella and I had a lovely time. I should typically as human beings, I want to run in and go, I went to Marbella or I did this or I did that. But actually, when you don't have an opinion,

and you ask a few more questions and you're sticking it a little bit longer, that's the sweet spot. That's like how communication really, really works. So not having an opinion on stuff. This is a great theme for February the 9th. I was in sales training with a guy a little while ago, right? And we were talking about mirroring, repeating one to three words from what someone just said, labeling and summaries, right? So labeling we've talked about before, sounds like, seems like, feels like, and then summaries.

just saying something, okay, so what you're saying is, and you're repeating that back to them. He was a bit skeptical on the call, I did it back to him without him noticing. But then I said to him, look, if you don't think it's gonna work, practice it in a low stakes environment. And he was like, well, I'm going to a party with my girlfriend this weekend. And then we had some cell training the next week. So he's offering no opinion about himself to people, like new people he's meeting, he's not telling them anything, they're just telling him things. And he's going.

Oh, it sounds like you're really passionate about that. Oh, it feels like that was quite a frustrating spot to be in. Okay. So what you're saying is, and he's playing it back to him and he's repeating different bits, but he's adding nothing new about himself. And he said to me, you know what? It's so weird. Everyone loved me at that party. They're all telling my girlfriend what a nice guy I was. I didn't tell them anything about myself. He gave them no opinion about himself, but they still really, really liked him because someone's favorite subject is always the same. It's always themselves, right?

And then I think about, well, sales leaders that are out there, right? They've got sales teams and they're going to stand in front of them and give them their opinion, right? And the sales teams are going to roll their eyes back. They're to be like, I don't know if I'm taking this on board. Yeah. Because something you need to realize is if I've got an idea and you've got an idea, even if it's unconsciously, you'll always prefer your idea over mine. So being a good sales leader is not telling someone how to do something.

is helping them get to the conclusion themselves. Yeah. So oftentimes when people come to us in our team and they, know, maybe they found it annoying from time to time that I'm having this problem. What would you do? Like, okay, well, what do you think is happening there? What do you think the problem is when you've come across this before? Have you found anything that works quite well? Okay. And did you do that this time? No. Okay. And then suddenly they're going, right. I get it. Because they prefer their idea to yours. Yeah.

And you can create something that's got much more embedded than I think it takes something like 17 times or something like that. might be, know, feel, it's a fact, 17 times with me telling you something before you actually get what I'm telling you. But you can figure it out once you'll take it on board. Yeah, that's so good. And for sales leaders as well, it starts with that self-awareness piece, but actually the best salespeople, the best sales leaders, they don't just, they don't stand at the front and just tell you or dictate. They lead.

Cause you hear horror stories of sales leaders that have kind of been in sales for 30 years. They've not made a cold call since the nineties and they get on and they'll say, well, I'll do it like this. Or they'll give their opinion, but actually the world has changed since then. So like the world's ever changing. So use people that are on the front line to get their feedback and then you can start to build it together. There's loads in that, but I think it's a great thing as well on sales calls.

A lot of the time you've got this knowledge about your product or your solution and you want to run in and be the expert and say, if this hour we're talking to X competitor, well, you want to give your opinion on them because you want to say, well, they're probably not as good as us because of X, Y and Z, but you don't need to give your opinion. No, no. think even if you, if you're in a competitive space, so your, your sales force, you know, someone's probably looking at HubSpot, they're looking at

can't think of another CRM, but they're looking at other CRMs. Other CRMs are available. When they jump on the call, your throwman shouldn't be, okay, well, let me tell you why Salesforce is so good. You should start off that call by saying, well, there's a lot of really good CRMs in the space. We're one of them. I said, why would you come to us? Yeah. And they're going to say, well, because I want X, Y, I've heard you're really good at this. And then you, okay, that's interesting. So it's actually, I've got your opinion on this rather than giving you mine.

And I think it's just a really useful frame to get into. We talk about something called the Ikea curve. The thing people really like about Ikea is you've built it yourself. So there's a bit of pride in the ownership. People prefer things that they've built themselves. So if you've got a product that's demoable, it's a software or something, before you jump in, having a moment to say, look, before I jump in, if you were in my shoes or you were in the developer's shoes, what would you want this to look like? What does this need to look like to stand a chance of working in your business?

That's so interesting. I thought the thing people liked about IKEA was the meatballs. I've been Jack Frimston. I've been Zack Thompson. Remember you will die... Meatballs.