Exploring SaaS Platforms with C. Lee Smith and Curiosity Assessment with Ulrik Lork

As the leader of your company, can you make sure that your successors are good enough for you to leave without serious mishaps? Here to answer this conundrum is C. Lee Smith, President and CEO of SalesFuel. Lee is the creator of several SaaS platforms for business performance, which include: AdMall, the industry leader for local advertising and digital media sales intelligence used by over 2,000 media properties across America; SalesFuel COACH, data-driven, adaptive sales coaching for time-starved managers; and TeamKeeper, a SaaS-based program for improving company culture, communication and retention.

Human personality plays an integral role in a company’s day-to-day operations, and the subsequent interplay of complex behaviors can make or break your profit margins. What if you could skip all the guesswork… and hack the code to efficiency? Ulrik Lork, a specialist in coaching, communication and leadership training, explores the wider implications of various curiosity assessments. He specializes in collaboration and has worked with top organizations in Sweden in the United States, Norway, Japan, Australia, and Switzerland.

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We have a great show. We have C. Lee Smith and Ulrik Lork. Lee is the President and CEO at SalesFuel. He’s also the host of his own show called Manage Smarter. Ulrik is an international leadership and communication expert. Both Lee and Ulrik have worked with Tony Alessandra to create assessments, which are fascinating to me.

Listen to the podcast here

Exploring SaaS Platforms with C. Lee Smith

I am here with C. Lee Smith who is the President and CEO of SalesFuel, a multimillion-dollar company based in Columbus, Ohio that provides SaaS platforms for sales enablement, sales management, and talent development. He’s also the Co-Host of the hit podcast, Manage Smarter. It’s nice to have you here Lee.

It’s great to be here, Diane.

This is going to be fun. Usually you’re on the other side of the mic. We’ll see how much you liked being in the hot seat.

Bring it on. Let’s see if I can handle it.

We have a lot in common. We’re both in the C-Suite Network and at C-Suite Radio and all of the things that we do as far as that goes. I know you do some work with Tony Alessandra who was just on my show recently. You’re doing a lot of helping for leaders becoming better leaders, right?

Yes. I’ve been working on a lot of projects that help the leaders become better leaders but also help the leaders create more leaders.

Is it important to be able to have people replace you? Is that the end goal to make sure that they’re good enough that if you leave, that there is no big deal that you’re leaving?

You can't really get to the next promotion if you don't have somebody as talented and as capable to replace you. Click To Tweet

You can’t really get to the next promotion if you don’t have somebody who’s talented and capable to replace you. Chances are, they’re going to be reporting to you if you get that promotion. You get to a point though when you get to the top of the ladder where maybe you don’t want people to replace you so easily. You need people who aren’t just good managers, but you need people though who possess leadership. I always like to say that managers or leaders whether they want to be or not, they’re perceived as leaders. This reminds me of the old Charles Barkley saying, “I’m not a role model.” Yes, you are. The same thing applies here. I think it was Brad Sugars said the quote, “The number one job of a leader is to create more leaders.” I believe he was absolutely right on that.

Barkley was an interesting guy. I agree that you have this impact on other people, whether you understand that impact or not. I teach a lot of courses. I’ve taught more than a thousand business courses. Almost everyone we’ve discussed, leaders versus managers and the strategic thinking versus the tactical thinking, I think a lot of managers are better at tactical than they are strategic. Are you dealing more with helping people think strategically or tactically? What’s your focus?

I blur the lines a little bit. On our podcast, Manage Smarter, we deal with a lot of leadership topics. We deal with leadership topics for the front-line managers and the middle managers, the emerging leaders. You have to help them get to that next level. Even if you are just a manage and not a leader at the moment, if you can learn some leadership skills, that goes a long way in helping you be a better manager. I like to say that good managers improve numbers, but great managers improve people. The difference that lies between management and leadership is managers are doers of tasks and leaders are developers of people.

Some people can be good at both. It’s interesting to see where everybody’s strengths lie. I know you talk to a lot of people about these issues and you give conference presentations about this. Gerhard Gschwandtner had said something very nice about your presentations. He was on my show. To have somebody high powered in sales have such nice things to say, it shows you’ve done a lot of great work in the area of sales. It interests me because I’ve been in sales for so many decades. You’ve created something new called SalesFuel COACH. I want to know more about that.

It’s helping to create more leaders and to create better people. There are lots of tools out there that help in sales enablement, improve your win rates, improve your activity levels and everything like that in sales. You can do sales blitzes all day long for that short burst of revenue that you need to make goal for the month. If you want to have a sustainable revenue increases month after month, the best way to do that is to improve your people. It really starts at the top. It starts with that behavior modeling from the sales manager. It should also help improve not only their management skills and sales skills but the people skills.

If I’m presented with an underperforming sales staff, immediately that directly correlates to an underperforming sales manager. A manager that is really not doing the things that he or she themselves shouldn’t be doing as a manager, let alone had been improving each individual on their staff. What SalesFuel COACH addresses that, why aren’t more sales managers doing more sales coaching? When study after study says that that you can increase your win rates with anywhere from 45% to 55% just by having a regular, routine and structured sales coaching program. If that’s the case, why isn’t everybody doing it and why aren’t they doing it more often? I wanted to set out to find out how big that issue really was.

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SaaS Platforms: The difference lies between management and leadership is a managers are doers of tasks and leaders are developers with people.

We did a study of 750 sales reps across the United States in sales departments of ten or more. We found only 19% of them said that they regularly get sales coaching that is personalized to their own unique needs. Only 22% of them say that the sales coach that they do get, can actually improve their win rates. If 78% of the coaching that has been delivered, it is not increasing the win rates. Why are we doing it? More importantly, why are we not doing it right? All the other studies that are out there says that you’re supposed to be able to see 50% bump by having a structured sales coaching program. I dug a little deeper into that and surveyed the sales managers. The number one excuse that we got back was, “I just don’t have time.”

I have to do these reports. I’m in these meetings. I had to put out these fires. A lot of them have to go out on sales calls. Even though they’re the manager, they’re actually going out and making sales. They don’t have time then to spend. The other misconception that they have about sales coaching is it has to take 45 minutes to an hour each time you sit down with the sales rep and have a one on one meeting. They start adding that up. What I wanted to do was to address that head on.

I’ve created this thing called quick coaching. You provide that information that the sales rep actually needs. It should be relevant to them and give it to them in bite size pieces. Give it to them in frequent bursts over and over again, so you never lose the momentum. Who doesn’t have five minutes? Everybody can easily point to five minutes that they’ve wasted in their day. The other choke point that we have is when the managers say, “I’m just so busy with everything that’s going on. How do I sit down and plan that? Who to coach? What the coach?” The other thing that we do is we use a lot of assessments.

You mentioned Tony Alessandra was on your show. He and I put together the leadership and talent development summit every January in San Diego, California. It’s not a bad place to be in January. We have people from all over the world come over and we improve their leadership skills and help them develop their talent. One of the ways in which we do is we have to measure it first. We measure the behavioral patterns of communication styles.

What are their motivations? How do they think, how do they learn? What’s their emotional intelligence? I think it’s critically important. We manage and take a look at other people’s skills. For salespeople, what we also do with our SalesFuel COACH program is that we take a look at their sales aptitude. How well do they know the basic sales techniques and how well do they know when and where to apply them? We can determine from those their skill gaps based on what everybody else in the world has taken these assessments and what those results show for them.

We manage those skill gaps. It’s also adaptive learning, where we’re adapting the content of what we’re trying to teach them to their unique needs. It’s not like sales training where you’re bringing everybody into a room or onto a webinar and you’re teaching them all the same thing in a classroom setting. The questions at the end are not designed to see if they actually absorb knowledge and retain knowledge. Our coaching questions are at the end of the quick coaching. We have ten pairs of questions for each particular topic, area of weakness, if you will. Those questions are not designed to find out if you read the material; we ask questions along the lines of, “How does this pertain to you? What’s the one thing you can do today to improve your performance in this particular area? What’s getting in your way? How can I help?” Things of that nature.

SalesFuel COACH is really designed to do those types of things. There’s one other aspect I wanted to tell you about, which is the best way to improve a sales team, Diane, is to improve the sales manager. If you improve a rep, you’ll improve one person. If you improve the sales manager, you improve the entire team. One of the things that we do is take a look at, what’s the culture like, working for that particular manager? Do they actually care about you as a person? Do they do a poor job of goal setting? Are they uneven on how they hold people accountable?

There are 50 different metrics that actually impact a work culture. Every manager has their own work culture. Whether you’re talking about company culture and corporate culture. The fact is, every manager based on how they decide what to enforce and whatnot doing for us, what behavior is acceptable, what behavior’s not acceptable, what performance is acceptable or not. They really define what their own unique culture is. We want to measure that and from that, we determine gaps in culture and management skills. We also provide quick coaching to the manager. Those results get sent up the chain of leadership. Improving the manager, improving the sales rep of not only on their sales game, but also in all aspects that applies to sales and customer service. Improving the culture overall by really getting in there and understanding that person. Be curious about each individual person as an individual person and then you can manage and lead that person to their own unique skill set.

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SaaS Platforms: Good managers improve numbers, but great managers improve people. ​

I think curiosity is so important. People leave bosses more than they leave organizations. It brought back all the years of sales training and things I had to go through. In pharmaceutical sales, you’d go through two weeks of training and then a whole year of on and off training. There was so much continuous training. When I was in mortgage sales they’d say, “Here’s your desk,” and that would be the extent of your training. You have all these different levels of what they do to help people learn.

I’m just remembering some of the sales bosses. Some of them were just the nice guys who just would say, “That was great.” They didn’t offer anything but you felt good because nobody was giving you anything negative.

You wouldn’t care for that at all. In our generation, not to over generalize but our generation preferred constant feedback. They want to know when they’re doing things right, as well as when they’re doing things wrong.

Then you have the ones that overly emphasize the things that you do wrong. You get the negative people who don’t even realize the culture that they’re putting down the pipe here. It’s interesting to have leaders get outside help because I think a lot of the leaders that I’ve seen who have the most issues with how they manage and lead learned it from their own leader that lacked certain skills.

Not only that but also the ultimate leader in someone’s life, which are their parents. A lot of times it goes all the way back to that.

You get a lot of cultural issues and different things from that. All that stuff ties in to what I’m studying in curiosity. I love that you work with assessments because I wrote my dissertation on emotional intelligence. Tony and I had talked about the different assessments. I’ve been developing the curiosity code that’s trying to analyze the things that hold people back from being curious. It’s really challenging to create a curiosity assessment or any assessment. What did you find was the hardest part when you were working on yours?

The first thing I did is I started with tried and true assessments that were already out there that were proven to be successful. I’m working on a project right involving toxicity. One of the things that I want to measure is the propensity for somebody to exhibit toxic behaviors that possibly have a negative impact on everybody else. That’s my pet assessment project. The issue there is assembling a bunch of smart people, PhDs and everything like that but also trying to get the PhDs into agreeing with the street-smart people.

For example, like me who had done the job for real and everything like that and they know what they’re looking for, I know what they want to avoid. You can’t measure it that way. It’s because getting everybody to agree and trying to decide the most important thing to actually look for and how to look for it. After that, testing it just to see if that all makes sense. How do I measure that? How do I measure that effectively? How do I do it without false positives or without having unintended consequences? Getting everybody to agree on that so far, has been my biggest challenge. It’s not a terrible challenge but it has made for some interesting discussions.

For me, I have the experience and the PhD conflicting in my head. It’s interesting because I did my own questions in factor analysis and trying to look at it. The statistics part is so challenging because you want to prove that these things aligned with what you’re trying to ask, of what you’re trying to determine these factors. Sometimes at face value, this is what I want to look at and this is what I think is important. However, it’s really hard for the science to support it, anecdotal things that are in your head. I had the same experience going through this. I’m curious, are you going to create any more assessments or was that a one-time thing?

There’s another assessment that I created called Sales Tech Assessment. These days it’s so important for salespeople then to be able to use technology in their jobs. We started with the basic stuff. We are making sure you can go to their website and glean important information about a prospect off of the website. Going to mother Google and then go into LinkedIn and how to use that effectively. Can you send an effective email? Can you send an effective of reply email? Can you use PowerPoint, Excel, Salesforce or any other CRM that’s out there? We measured proficiency in those particular areas. For example, we had a disagreement internally here, where we had a question about the most dangerous part about adding people then to an email. We want to get people to think about that before they would do that. Some people would say, it just includes other people that doesn’t need to be on the thread.

The number one job of a leader is to create more leaders. Click To Tweet

One of the most dangerous parts of it is that it creates opportunity for posturing. You’ve got a bigger audience now and you’ve got people where, I can’t let my boss see me potentially being weak in dealing with this particular person. We have those back and forth. We do our assessments the same way as college exams, there’s multiple right answers and you had to pick the best right answer. There’s some discussion and dispute about that. Candidly, I think the thing that you have to do in that situation is nod from the conclusion first, and then try to look for the data to support it. You have to keep an open mind so that the evidence is pointing you in a different direction. You really have to follow that evidence and see where that leads you. See if perhaps that leads you to a different conclusion than what you originally had in mind.

There’s so much involved in getting somebody better in terms of performance in so many different areas. I think a lot of people need a lot of help of knowing this email etiquette. We call it Netiquette in my online courses. There’s so much of reasoning behind why you would do or wouldn’t do certain things. A lot of that is what I’m looking at with curiosity of what holds people back. In technology is something that holds a lot of people back either because they’re afraid of it or does things for them and they don’t have to think.

What kind of impact do you see that technology has had in the sales arena? I remember when I was in pharmaceutical sales, we used to keep everything in notebooks. We handwrote things until computers were invented. When it came out, people freaked out that we had to use computers because you’re so used to doing things one way. You’ve got generations that are used to technology changing so much, but it’s so fast. How much problems are you seeing with salespeople adapting to all these changes in technology?

I see two right off the bat. I think that by being behind a computer screen, we’ve lost that personal touch. I think that’s one of the reasons why we see people skills being in short supply, particularly among management. You don’t have to worry about looking somebody in the eye and having a firm handshake. You might say things behind the computer screen that you would never say to somebody in person. You miss a lot of nonverbal cues when you’re doing that sort of thing. It has not helped our ability to maintain people skills.

In terms of disagreements. I think our level of civility, you see that in political discourse. We’ve always had that, just watch the British parliament for example. Those are two that immediately come off the top of my head. The biggest one to me is that curiosity is absolutely critical for someone in sales these days. Gone are the days where you can just show up and tell somebody all about your product because they know all about your product. They have Google, they have the Internet, and they’ve been to your website. They probably already read several reviews of other people that have already bought your product. You can’t let them know more about your product than they do. What they don’t know is how your product or your service can actually help them solve a problem or achieve your goals.

That’s where you have to have creativity to really learn as much as you can about their company, their situation. Not only that, but their customer. If you can please their customer through use of your product, then you’re just that much farther ahead. You have to understand their business methodology and their workflows to understand, “How does the use of my product fit into their workflow and how can I make sure that they are following best practices to be able to get the most out of this product?” That requires curiosity.

Going back to your question about the technology is I think sometimes we’ve gotten a little lazy in the area of discovery. We think that all we have to do is go to LinkedIn and find out where the guy went to college or find out where she managed last and think that we’re prepared for a sales call. When in reality, we’re not better prepared to ask smart questions. We need to actually do a lot more digging than that. The information you really need is to have a face to face conversation. You have to show that you care. You have to show that you’ve done your homework so they don’t feel like they have to educate another sales rep, but they actually feel like you give a damn. They’re going to be more apt to share information with you and that is leverage. Start with the technology but don’t stop there. I see too many sales people stopping there. If they continue on, they would have smart conversations. That gives you leverage that your competitors don’t have.

When I do a sales aptitude assessment, I find that there is a correlation between people who have problems closing and people who don’t do well in discovery. I’m not saying that’s the only reason why people can’t close. Sometimes people do great in discovery and do everything else. They don’t ask for the order or they’re not competent enough or something like that. That’s also a factor, but there is a correlation between people who can’t do discovery or won’t do discovery and people who can’t close.

I could see that would be a huge connection. Have you had Barry Rhein on your show at all?

No, I have not. I would love to.

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SaaS Platforms: A lot of managers are better at tactical than they are strategic. ​

He teaches curiosity selling at Stanford. He also teaches how to use curiosity to be better at sales. I think you’d be somebody he would find fascinating. All the stuff we talked about today is right up my alley. It’s been interesting to have you on the show, Lee. I was just wondering if you could share how people could find out more about you and listen to your show too.

They could go to ManageSmarter.com and that is a podcast. It’s quick hitting, we wrap everything up usually in about twenty minutes. We’ve had great guests on that show. We’ve had Tom Peters, we’ve had Jeff Gitomer, we’ve had Brian Tracy and a lot of really smart people. It’s available anywhere, we’re a podcast or a Board Member of the C-Suite Radio network. We’re also on iHeartRadio. For me personally, on LinkedIn, look for C. Lee Smith. CLeeSmith.com is my personal website, SalesFuel.com is my company website. I’m also on Twitter under the handle, @cleesmith. Reach out and listen to the show and drop me a line. I’d love to talk to really smart people and learn all I can.

Thank you so much, Lee. This has been so much fun.

I really appreciate it. It was great.

You are welcome.

Curiosity Assessment with Ulrik Lork

I am here with Ulrik Lork who’s a specialist in coaching, communication and leadership training. He specializes in collaboration and has worked with top organizations in Sweden, United States, Norway, Japan, Australia and Switzerland. It’s so nice to have you here.

Thank you very much. It’s an honor to be here.

Thank you. I’m very interested in what you do. I saw that you were part of something that Tony Alessandra had done a while back. I started playing around on his site looking for some of the people he had on some of his webinars and different things he’s done. He’s really impressive to me. He’s been on my show. I’m curious what it is that you were part of with his group and what it is that you specialized in that particular situation?

I was introduced to Tony and his team at the Assessment 24×7. What I missed when I started working with them was a collaboration assessment. I asked Tony, “Why don’t you have one? Why would they be thinking about it for many years?” I said, “Why don’t you do it?” “Why, can you help us?” I did. A month later we had the report out.

I’m working on an assessment right now. I don’t know if you’re aware of it. I’m writing a book on curiosity and I’ve been working on an assessment to determine what holds people back from being curious. Creating it is tough. What did you include as far as collaboration? What kind of things did you look at to determine whether they were collaborating well?

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SaaS Platforms: I’ve been working on an assessment to determine what holds people back from being curious and creative.

I’ve been working for about ten years with the special focus of two people collaborating. A lot of assessments are based for one person or a team. That if you really look at when people interact, it’s almost always two and two. Especially when we’re talking about leadership, collaboration, on that specific topic. I didn’t find anything about it in that field of research, I just had to do it.

There are curiosity assessments out there that measure curiosity. There aren’t really ones that will tell you what’s holding you back. I think that there’s all these different assessments out there. I wrote my dissertation on emotional intelligence, so I’m certified to give a Myers-Briggs. I noticed you do DISC and different things on your profile. There are all these different personality assessment tools but a lot of them are challenging because they’re self-assessments. Did you find it challenging for people to self-assess or is there any way to really be less subjective when you measure collaboration?

I think it’s impossible get away from the subjective part when you look at self-assessment. What I did when I did the design was to use the DISC assessment as the basis. Design one that put the core of two individuals together and then made the duo and look at it and filter out what’s really relevant for the situation. In that way, you can be very specific when you create a collaboration strategy. I think that’s the outcome.

I’m curious on the DISC personality profile. You have a high D on the DISC and another person is a high S for example. How do they collaborate? Is that a difficult scenario for me to give you? I’m just trying to figure out how DISC ties in.

Let’s say you have that scenario, D and S. The thing with DISC, it’s not really a personality assessment, it’s more of a behavior assessment. It means that your natural style, your natural tendency is to be very direct for D and very stabilizing if you’re an S. In different circumstances, given different contexts, people bring out different behaviors. That’s what you should use DISC for, according to me.

I think it’s a really important tool. I think that all these tools are really fascinating. When I started writing my dissertation on emotional intelligence, I started looking at different personality tests. I think that there’s so many useful ones. You think DISC is useful. Are there other personality assessments popular with you?

I think that there’s a number of them out there. I compare DISC versus MBTI. I think DISC is so much more intuitive and easy to remember. The MBTI, Myers-Briggs, is the deeper analysis of the same thing in my point of view. If you go into the real personality test, then you’re looking at many different aspects. StrengthsFinder is a very nice tool if you want to look at what you are good at and what motivates you. If you want to start measuring the full personality, you’ll need some more extensive, more exciting and a deeper analysis.

I find it all fascinating to look at some of the assessments, not just personality but engagement surveys and different surveys out there. Everybody’s trying to improve productivity by understanding people better. You want people to get along better by just embracing the differences in others and in developing empathy, which is a big part of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence assessment will assess to some degree, right?

Yes.

Do you think that we should use these assessments as tools to hire people? Can you base your hiring practices on them or do you think they’re just useful to help people get along once they’re already hired?

Look at DISC because that’s the assessment I’ve been working most with. It’s possible to use it as a part of a recruitment process. As long as you remember that’s the behavior that gives you a snapshot of a preference of a behavior. If you look at the thing with hiring, it’s filtering people out of qualified enough. You need personality tests so you can detect what’s not so well about that person, because sooner or later that will be the problem.

What led to your interest in collaboration and what led to your interest in assessing?

The main interest in collaboration is that we are social human beings. The majority of us will always have a richer life when we do well in collaborations. The people that we are most dependent on, whether it’s in your private life or your work life, it’s usually very specific. It might be your boss, your spouse, whatever. When you look at that specific, you also need a specific assessment. For example, if you and I would be working together in a project, we’ll need to be specific about the project. The pros and cons of our behaviors but also of our personalities. My recommendation is always to be very specific when using assessments because the general use is usually not very interesting or valuable.

People bring out different behaviors in different contexts. Click To Tweet

What do you mean specific? I’m curious.

For example, if I do a personality assessment in the context of a workplace or in the context of my relationship with my wife or whatever I use it for, then it might be very useful. The general use of assessments in my opinion is more or less wasted. The specific use is very valuable. If you use the right assessment for the right use, for the right context, it’s very interesting.

My assessment, I’m looking at the workplace more because it’s so general if you talk about curiosity. You have the curiosity to eat this or jump out of an airplane. There are so many directions you can go. I think it’s important to use these assessments in the workplace. The bottom line is we want productivity, we want innovation, we want engagement, and we want people to embrace what they do. I think a lot of people are misaligned sometimes to jobs. People never really ask them, “What are you interested in?” or analyze what their preferences are versus this job, if it’s a good match. You think a lot of people are mismatched in what you’ve seen?

Yeah, you can see a lot of assessments or surveys. Surprisingly many are very low motivated at work. That’s big challenge and I think the challenge will be even greater when we look in the future. I think in the future we might even be looking at team hunting.

Elaborate on that. I’m curious what you mean by team hunting.

A lot of times if you’re a business, you want things to be done. If you hire a contractor, it’s a big risk to hire just one person. What if the person gets sick? I think we’ll see creative solutions in the future where people will hire more teams.

That’s an interesting perspective and I can see that that would be something that would happen. You became this collaboration expert. You’re Swedish but you work in all these different countries. Give me a little background. What’s your education? I saw your list of all of these companies you’ve worked for, it’s an amazing background.

I’ve been working for Fortune 500 companies. My background started as a mechanical engineer. It took me about a year to figure out engineering seems interesting, but people are more interesting. I studied psychology and psychotherapy for a number of years, then turned into people management. As a line manager later in the day, as an HR consultant, I am now an organizational consultant. I’m also a business owner. I have three different businesses that I own fully or partly. It’s been a long journey from engineering to people management. Along that way I think I did synthesis with the personalities system from the engineering background. If you start looking at behavior, it’s not that difficult to put it into a system. I think the DISC system is a very nice way of having a simple but powerful system.

How did you get to do this in so many countries?

One of my life intentions is to be an adventurer. If I get a chance to travel the world, see the world, do things in different countries, I’m almost always very positive or open to look at what’s there.

You deal with a lot on helping people with success, their meaning and their purpose, intentions and goals. What do you like to talk about the most when you go to organizations to help them? Is it always collaboration? Is it always success? Is there an underlying thread to all of it?

I think what makes me happy, deep down in my heart is when I can make people enjoy their lives, solving their problems. Whether that is a leadership issue, collaboration issue or communication issue, it doesn’t really matter to me. If I can be a part of the solution to someone’s daily problems, I am blessed.

You’ve had some life changing moments I imagine that you witnessed when you worked at all these major companies. Is there a particular case that stands out in your mind that made you just think that, “This is where I need to be, doing this?”

The feeling that life cannot be better than this. It’s the moment when things come together. When you hear the insight of someone really getting it. When people get successful in whatever they have been dreaming about. Life becomes meaningful when you create games was playing in and goals worth playing for.

It’s probably one of the reasons why I’m studying curiosity so much because I see so many people just exist rather than live. They could probably be a lot happier or have more interesting fulfilling lives if they just did a little bit to explore their curiosity. I think there’s so many factors that hold people back from being curious. You said you’re a curious person. Do you think you can help somebody else be curious or does that just have to come from them? What’s your opinion on that?

As social beings, we always affect each other. Some are very receptive to other people. A lot of extroversion on their lives. Some people are more inward direct. I have this Japanese proverb that I think of, when it comes to your intention in life. I think the vision without action, it’s a daydream. Action without vision, is a nightmare. I think you need to get vision and action together, whether it’s in your daily life or the small tasks you do. It’s very much about how you lead your life, not what you do.

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SaaS Platforms: If you hire a contractor, it’s a big risk to hire just one person. What if the person gets sick? What if it gets injured​?

That’s challenging for a lot of people who don’t know where to begin. What advice would you give them if they don’t feel like they’re on track?

Start with the small things. I see there are four magic moments every day. One is when you start your day, how do you start today?

I exercise in the morning.

How did you do that? How’s your perfect morning routine for waking your brain up.

Like Tony Robbins, he takes his ice bath. You’ve got to find the thing that works for you though, right?

Exactly. Whether it’s a morning walk, I do meditation. It’s like having a mental waking up in a very soft way to have daily start with fifteen to 30 minutes of meditation. I get up every morning at 5:30 AM or 6:00 AM and do that. It’s like brushing your teeth but on a mental, spiritual level. The second one is when you get to work, how do you start your work day? Do you start by reading all the emails that have come in during the night or chit chat your coworkers? Do you sit down and focus on what would be useful today? What would make my day if I did only one thing? The third one is the end of the workday. How do you finish it? How do you wrap it up? What needs to happen so you leave your workplace in good spirit? Do you rush away, things have done? The last one is how you end your day. What do you do before you go to bed? Do you sit down to relax, drink, do you fall asleep half drunk?

I do my meditation, listening to things to calm down at night. I think all day and then I can’t shut it off and for me it helps me to distract myself and to get focused back on calm.

Whatever makes you feel good, do it.

We are social beings and the majority of us will always have a richer life. Click To Tweet

It gets overwhelming to some people to think about big changes in baby steps sometimes is all we need. You brought up so many important points here. I really enjoyed having this conversation with you and I think a lot of people would be interested in knowing how they can find out more from you. Do you have a website or some information you want to share?

They can always email me at Ulrik@UL3.se or check out www.UL3.se.

Thank you so much. It was so nice to have you on the show.

I would love to look at your emotional assessment when it comes out.

I’d be happy to show it to you. I’m still working on it. You can take it if you want when we get to that point. I want to thank Lee and Ulrik for being such great guests, learned so much from both of them. I’m really interested in the work that people do with assessments, looking at a personality and the challenges that are involved. I really enjoyed putting together my assessment for the Curiosity Code. If you’re interested in learning more about that, you can go to my website.

You can also get to the website to learn more about past episodes if you’ve missed any. I hope you do check out past guests because we have a lot of amazing people, including Tony Alessandra who we mentioned on this show. I hope you take time to check out the site and please join us for the next episode of Take the Lead Radio.

About C. Lee Smith

TTL 224 | SaaS PlatformsC. Lee Smith is the President and CEO of SalesFuel® – a multi-million dollar company based in Columbus, Ohio that provides SaaS platforms for sales enablement, sales management and talent development. He is also the co-host of the hit podcast Manage Smarter.

About Ulrik Lork

TTL 224 | SaaS PlatformsUlrik Lork is a specialist in coaching, communication and leadership training. He specializes in collaboration and has worked with top organizations in Sweden, the United States, Norway, Japan, Australia, and Switzerland., C. Lee Smith is the President and CEO of SalesFuel® – a multi-million dollar company based in Columbus, Ohio that provides SaaS platforms for sales enablement, sales management and talent development. He is also the co-host of the hit podcast Manage Smarter. 

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