– Welcome everybody to today’s Building My Legacy Podcast. I have with me today, Susan Trumpler. Susan Trumpler has a company called Women in Business or Unstoppable Women in Business and Beyond ROI. We get so stuck on ROI at this time of the year. We’re looking at numbers, numbers, numbers. And Susan looks beyond that. And she looks especially at women and how women are empowered or can be empowered in your organizations to really get you beyond those things that have stopped you, the ROI, important, but perhaps it also becomes a bottleneck. So Susan, tell us a little bit about your company. What got you started? I know you started in sales. So tell us a little bit about your journey and what got you doing what you’re doing.

– Absolutely. Thank you for having me today. It’s nice to be here, Lois. So I was in sales for nearly 20 years with a wonderful company that I still, it’s ADP. I always say if I were to cut my wrist, little ADPs, little red ADPs would bleed out because I was just such an advocate for the organization. So it was easy to sell for them. And it was easy to learn how to advocate and truly what sales was. And as I got comfortable and successful in that, I moved up from the actual selling into sales leadership, and then I found really my home, which was in learning and development and coaching because Lois, I have such an insatiable desire to understand why people do the things they do, especially when it comes to selling, which is not the easiest thing to adopt or to have as a career. But when someone is in sales and they know that something is going to be good for them yet they still don’t do it, I just get so curious, so what’s stopping you? What is holding you back? And so through coaching, and through using coaching tools and my knowledge of sales, I have just been a devotee for the past 15 years of understanding what is it that helps people become more effective and adopt behaviors and skills that will help them become more successful? And that’s actually how I evolved into Beyond ROI. Just like you said, when everyone thinks about ROI, they’re thinking of that lagging indicator of success, is there a bang for the buck? We made an investment, are we able to recuperate the investment via business impacted? But the reason our company is called Beyond ROI is because we actually take a step backward to the leading indicators of success, which is the behavior. Someone goes, they get introduced to new behaviors. You have no idea whether or not they’re effectively applying those behaviors. And that’s where, whether it’s sales or any part of the organization, you really have to take a look, when you’re trying to determine ROI on any initiative, you have to take a look at how much of that initiative, how much of the behaviors that you’re trying to change are actually being effectively applied in the role. And you can’t just say, because everyone’s on the same team and they were all exposed to the same information that they are all applying it at the same level. It just doesn’t happen. I’m always honored to work with large companies in initiatives where they have introduced their people to new behaviors, new sale skills, and really determine how effectively they’re being implied. And then go across that dotted line to say, “Well, if they’re effective, “is it making the difference we thought it would make “in the business?” So we have just a really good time because I think you’d agree, Lois, that any time you invest money in any initiative, it’s the sustainability of that initiative that really is the true ROI. It’s not a point in time. It’s not a snapshot. And so if you can help an organization understand what’s going well, what still needs a little bit of coaching and support and reinforcement so that they can increase the impact and increase the sustainability, that is the true potential of ROI in an organization. So that’s what we do with Beyond ROI. And I just talk about Genesis, I just took what I do well with Beyond ROI and brought it to the entrepreneur level. So I love to help women entrepreneurs who are passionate about something they are really good at become better at connecting with people and helping them understand the value that they can bring and why they would wanna partner with them. So it’s all about just helping people get better at what they do.

– So tell me, what have you found? What are the big bottlenecks? What stops people the most?

– Oh, thank you for asking this question because people always think that it’s the skills, it is a behavior like I’ve been talking about, you need to execute on these behaviors, but Lois, if you and I were both introduced to the same behaviors and had the same opportunity within an organization, and yet we got different results, is it really the behavior? So to me, the bottleneck in almost any situation is between people’s ears. It’s not the doing or execution of their role in their job, especially in sales, it’s what’s happening from their perspective as they think about executing. So because of the way our brains are wired, we are naturally resistant to change, we’re naturally resistant to doing anything that is “risky” that we might fail at, we’re very cautious, and we can stop ourselves from being successful by procrastinating, by avoiding, by not doing the hard things, but just kind of, I call it buffering, doing all the easy stuff that really doesn’t make much of a difference and leaving the things that are high impact activities to the wayside. So the bottleneck is our own selves and how we look at things.

– A lot of it is our attitude, isn’t it? It’s our perspective of our ourselves. And it’s also what we are willing to hold ourselves accountable to, which is sometimes the hardest.

– That is the truth. That is the truth. And thankfully so because that’s why I’m in business, Lois. I have run a group called Success Collaborative. And honestly, it’s a mastermind style group, but a big part of it is the accountability. I don’t know why, well, I do know why, from human nature standpoint, we never hold ourselves as accountable to ourselves as we do to others. It’s human nature. So instead of fighting it, you create accountability circles and you say, “Okay, let’s put it out there. “What’s the goal? “How are you going to achieve it? “Let’s get back and find out how things went.” And it keeps people moving forward because they wanna be accountable to that external source. It works.

– It works. Susan, you have such a wonderful opportunity to reach into organizations and help them rethink because sales is often the sore that’s on an organization. It’s like always having a scab that keeps getting opened up because you can’t thrive without sales, you can’t grow without sales. And yet it’s an area in which we struggle a lot.

– My apologies.

– No problem. We struggle a lot with putting the right focus on sales and really building sales in a way that’s logical. We tend to put pressure on, make your numbers, make your numbers, and it works to a certain extent. Talk a little bit about that and how what you do differs.

– Oh, that is such a great topic. So when you work in an environment like I did at ADP, which is a public company, and they are responsible to their shareholders to bring in their forecasted revenues, so there’s a special level of pressure when you’re in that situation. But any business owner, they live and breathe by how much revenue they’re able to generate, whether they’re responsible to themselves or to their shareholders. But what happens is exactly what you’re saying is that there becomes a very much pressure, again, on the lagging indicator of the number and it becomes more about quantity than quality. I just see this like a whip in somebody’s hand, and we used to say it when we were on the team, it’s like, “What have you done for me lately? “What’s your number? What’s your number? “What’s your number? “Are you meeting your forecast?” It was you gave a forecast of what you believed you were going to hit and they held you to it, but more around what’s your number? What’s your number. And so from my perspective, you have to have quantity of activity, like you’ve gotta be doing things, but the quality of the activity can really impact your results far more than the actual quantity. You can do less quantity if you’re doing it well and you’re doing the right things. I also worked for a sales leader. I loved it when she used to say to me, “How are you doing, Susan?” I’d be like, “I am busy. “Oh my gosh, I am so busy.” She goes, “Yeah, it’s easy to be busy when you’re in sales, “you can always find something to do, “but the question is, “are you doing the right things? “Are you doing the things that are “a little bit more challenging? “And are you doing them with high quality?” And so I think that is probably the biggest challenge for any sales leader or CRO is to really make certain they’re looking at both sides of the picture, that they have the quantity and they have the activity that’s appropriate and necessary, but that they’re also providing the support and the help on making certain it’s high levels of activity. I hate to go on and on about this, but I can tell you how many times I have strategy calls with really large organizations with many, many, many teams around the world, and I talk about, are you coaching and reinforcing what these people learned and what you want them to do as ideal behaviors? And I hear their response to be something like, “Our sales leaders don’t have time to coach. “They’re out there driving the number. “They’re out there driving the number. “They don’t have time to coach.” And it just makes me shake my head and say, “Ooh, that’s an attitude that will always keep you chasing “instead of pushing and moving things forward “or chasing the result.”

– It’s part of how we have that conversation. And I think along with that, part of your spirit, Susan, is the spirit of working with some equality, is all about working whether there’s a collaborative spirit that’s a part of that. And that’s part of who you are. You collaborate with your daughter as a business partner so it is very much who you are. So speak a little bit about that. And why collaboration for you?

– Yeah, it’s funny because one of my taglines is that sales is a team sport. If you think about it, you’re called a coach, when you are a sales leader, you are a coach. And a coach’s job is to not only, it’s like this 360 degree view of success. You support your person, each person is on a team and they support each other because the sum of the parts is always greater than the individual, sorry–

– Than the individual’s, yes.

– Exactly, exactly. And so when you are working, and I do believe that sales is probably one of the most challenging professions to be in from a psychological perspective because you’re measured every day, you’re measured around whether or not you get to keep your job. And so there’s a lot of pressure. And if you are not collaborating with your team members, with your leaders, with your upline leaders, with everyone who’s available to you with a coach, then you are in a vacuum or a void that you don’t have the necessary inputs to be creative and to really excel at what you’re doing, plus you begin to see things through a lens that is not, again, going back to that primitive brain and how it’s trying to protect you, without being challenged, you could fall prey to believing what that brain is telling you as opposed to using your neocortex that really sees things more clearly. But it is collaboration that gets anyone to success in challenging situations like sales.

– So when you collaborate, Susan, give us an example. Let’s start there, when you’ve seen collaboration work really well.

– So I’ll go back to the Success Collaborative, which is the name of the group that I’m in. And I do collaborate with my people, my clients. So we’re in . I collaborate with them, they collaborate with each other. But also, I’m a good sales coach. And I know I’ve run my own business for a while, but I don’t know everything. When I can collaborate with someone else who has expertise in areas that I don’t have expertise in, that brings another layer of potential to my people. So I am always looking for where are the holes? What is the need that they have that I am not the perfect person to fill? And who can I collaborate with to bring that together? So it’s almost like the pie becomes whole because you bring extra into it and you make it a stronger wheel. It usually works extraordinarily well. It is sometimes a challenge to find the right people to collaborate with. And from my perspective, because I am sales oriented, I am a bit more a right-brained person. So I love to see the possibilities and the human part of my strengths. I really thrive over on the right side of my brain. I’m not great on the left hand side of my brain, which is more of the facts and the processes. So when a collaboration doesn’t go well, it is because I’m seeing it through my lens, and assigning, making assumptions and assigning the characteristics of what I believe or want to believe about out someone through that view of mine. And then as we get deeper into collaboration, I find that my lens may not have been, they might have been a little foggy. And that we may not be able to collaborate as smoothly as I thought we could because of the fact that they may require something that I don’t have or I may require something that they don’t naturally have as a gift. And then we’re into deep because I’m very impetuous. So I’ll jump in to a collaboration full force and then be like, “Oh, darn, I should have slowed that down just a little bit, “tested the waters, “made certain that we’re compatible in all areas “before making a huge commitment.” So that’s what I’ve found in my experience.

– It seems to me there’s a natural process there because all of relationships are learning. You never see it exactly the same as true mother to daughter. You make assumptions based on what you think and then you learn, and then you adapt. But we think that if we’re having a “good” collaborative relationship, we shouldn’t have to go through those adjustments and yet it’s part of being human.

– It is, it is. And that is such a great example. When my daughter Lindsay became a partner in Beyond ROI, it’s interesting, I think this is the same for all collaborations, from her perspective, we came in as equals, she had as to give is I had to give, but she felt from me that I was looking at myself above her, that because of my experience and my domain expertise in sales and in my years and years of experience that I was bringing at the table, she was sensing from me that I was not respecting her and what she was bringing to the table as someone who was an entrepreneur and really had her own gifts. Okay, maybe I thought that every once in a while. I won’t say that I wasn’t completely unguilty, not guilty of that–

– It could be natural as a mom.

– And that’s the other thing too, Lois, we were transferring a mother daughter relationship to a business partner relationship. So there was the dynamics of positioning that goes on. And I think it was more exaggerated as a mother and daughter trying to work out how to become partners, but I believe it’s in every collaboration that each person comes in and almost postures, where are they? Are they equals in it? Is there are some strengths? And how can they posture themselves? And if it remains unspoken, it will create tension. And the tension in collaborations is always where the wheels start to get a little wobbly on the wagon.

– And that’s where it tends to fall apart. So tell me about a time for you that you have observed when collaboration just didn’t work.

– See, collaboration is at the core of my being so I really have to dig on this one. So I’ll go back to corporate again from a hierarchy standpoint where if there is too much structure and someone is not willing, the only word that comes to mind is share, someone is territorial and holds the reigns tightly, they’re not willing to be open to considering alternatives, it’s their way or it’s the highway, you don’t see it as much anymore, but there there’s still places where people are intimidated by loosening up and allowing for collaboration when the stakes are high and that they’re responsible for the results. So that is my case. I don’t know. Lois, how would you answer that question?

– I think when the stakes are high, it is really tough. So I think that’s one, and the other is, do you see that you’re in competition with people? And I think one of the problems that we have in our organizations is we’re always looking for that next promotion. We’re looking for that next raise, that next, next, next. And so in that context, we see ourselves as competitive not collaborative because we have to stand out.

– Agreed. Agreed.

– So that makes collaboration more difficult.

– I agree. And what came to mind for me was that it is when you have the mindset of scarcity, if you are in a scarce mindset, then you’re not able to collaborate because it’s not safe, and you have to be very protective, almost like building a moat around yourself. So if you can be abundant and say, “There’s more than enough, “and we all bring value to the table, “and there will be results from this.” I think you’re in a better position to collaborate for certain.

– So now I want to ask you a very tough question, and this comes from speaking with a woman who was in the C-suite of a Fortune one company so very high in a very large company. And her comment, we did a podcast with her, so her story is public. And her comment was that sense of wanting to collaborate, but people squeezing in and constantly wanting her spot. So she’s like, it’s the dog fighting off the pack so that they can be that lead dog. And being exhausted. So here’s the question I have for you. That was a woman who was in a C-suite. She wanted something different. She saw a possibility of something different. And so my question is, is this more of a goal, a desire, a wish, that women have versus men? And if so, how do you navigate that?

– Oh, that’s so good. All right, so I’m gonna take it out of gender and put it into an energy standpoint. I believe it is a very masculine energy to be territorial. Think about what men were born and bred to do is to protect like their hunters. And so the masculine energy is very protective, and very territorial, and very, I’m gonna build my kingdom and protect it and not let people in. The female energy is community and collaboration. Now, you can be a man that has a feminine energy and how you execute in your role and how you come to become successful. I would say, and I’ve been there, and especially since it’s just so incredibly still, the percentages of females in the C-suite are still just dismal. How much energy do you wanna put into fighting the natural energies of the people you’re with? So if you’re on that C-suite, and it is a lot of masculine energy, where they are pushing, shoving, this picture I see these rams come to my mind with their horns, bucking people out of the way. Is that where you want to put your energy into changing them? Because you can, but it’s not going to be easy and it’s going to take a lot of you to be able to collaborate in that environment. Or is it better to find the natural place that you belong with the proper energy field where you can be successful and not drain yourself just trying to get there? Does that make sense?

– It does make a lot of sense. And so here’s another question that I have for you relative to that, because I think people choose to be in those positions because they love the challenge. You can move, you can shake, you can change things, you can build things, you can make things happen, and there’s an excitement about that. And so if you want to be a part of that excitement, then I think how, so one of the ways that I think you can navigate that is to build a collaborative space.

– Yes.

– So your thoughts on that.

– This is all about collaboration so I coach someone who’s on an executive team and she has worked her way up to a very high position in a large company. And each level that she’s gone through, she’s had to find her allies. So if you can find a pocket in essence, who is the person who might have that energy, but could go either direction? And how can you become allies with that person so that you can navigate the field in a way that doesn’t deplete you? You keep picking up in essence, an ally here, an ally there, an ally here, and it’s a stepping stone. And so then it becomes a matter of just protecting yourself when you are against the, you’re coming up against the people that are harder to work with. How will you approach that and move through it without letting it deplete you? Again, it goes back to your choosing, how you think about a situation and what actions you take from there. So it becomes more strategic, I think, Lois. If you like to play chess, this is a perfect analogy for this is how can you move the furthest, and move this out of the way, and do this, and then move that? It is like a chess board at that point.

– And it’s staying a couple moves ahead.

– Yes.

– Assessing the situation ahead of you and looking so you can stay ahead. Susan, our time is almost up, and it has flown by, absolutely flown by. The last thoughts that you wanna leave with the audience before we close out.

– I think that the thing that I would say to the audience is the more you become aware of how you think, and how you react, and get curious, just really curious, don’t condemn yourself, don’t resent or be hard on yourself, but just notice, when are you in a place where you can collaborate a little bit more, that you can become a little bit more open, that you don’t need to protect yourself, you can think with more abundance. The people that I see that are the most successful do a lot of work on their internal thinking and really getting curious around the stories that they tell themselves and making sure they’re clean in how they’re thinking about things so that they can execute it the highest of their capabilities.

– Susan, you have been absolutely marvelous. I like that about being curious because I think curiosity allows us to also honestly look at ourselves. It allows us to honestly look at other people and say, “Okay, what works? “What isn’t working? “And how can I navigate in that?” Once you understand, it’s like walking in the other person’s shoes in a way when you become suddenly curious about what’s making them work.

– Yeah.

– We are going to have information about Susan and her company in the show notes. So please contact her. She’ll be fabulous for you. If you’re looking at building, developing, working through what you’re working through with your sales numbers and with your leadership teams as a coach, and as women who are also looking at how can they be empowered in what they’re doing at work, Susan will be a great resource. So information about her will be in the show notes. Thank you, Susan, for being with us. Thank you for being with us on Building My Legacy Podcast today.

– Awesome. Thank you, Lois, for having me. Have a great day.