[E266] Sales Rebellion, with Dale Dupree (Part 1)

Jason: Hey, welcome to another special guest episode that I have the pleasure of presenting to you. This conversation is very special to me for many reasons. So I have Dale Dupree. He is the founder of the Sales Rebellion, which to a lot of people sounds weird and out there, and he's an amazing force. His previous venture and kind of the brand that he has still, but he has moved towards the rebellion, is as the Copier Warrior. Please, if you want to find out more about his story, we don't talk about his background because I want to get right into the content. So please check him out. You can go to the sales rebellion.com. You can also find him on LinkedIn and everything that he's doing. So basically a little background on his story is he went into the family business, selling copiers early on in life, working for his father. Who then turned into a mentor and a role model and the one that was the guiding light for him and relationships and sales. And little did he know that this was going to lead to a long term passion for sales and relationships and become a movement that he's focused on to help create a way that sales is shifting away from way it's always been done to a different way, especially in B2B sales, face to face world that he lives in. And I. Enjoy being able to call him a growing friend in a relationship and we talked It was last year, early on 2019. I was beginning consulting. He was beginning his movement. I was just starting my podcast. He was getting out there more and to see the evolution has been amazing and I appreciate his point of view and I know this is a long intro for the podcast, but I want you to just know that he and I really are focusing on this movement, right? He calls it the rebellion. And it's about helping people sell in a different way and being authentic and being true to who they are and being successful in that way, instead of an old playbook or an old model. And I think it's super valuable. And the things that we talk about in this episode, including him and his father. There's so many gems in here for people who are selling and how to operate at a different level in a different way. That's not somebody else's playbook. So it's not about Dale's playbook. It's about you being true to who you are and then making that successful. So hopefully you enjoy this conversation, this mini series, this set of episodes. And here we go. I'm going to kick it into the conversation with Dale. Dale, welcome to the sales experience podcast. Dale: Thanks for having me, bro. Jason: So we are, and I say this about a bunch of people, but I think it's just 'cause I'm attracting them into my life, and I think that's what we always do, but I feel like we're like brothers from another mother in terms of the mission and goal of helping salespeople. Do it. I don't want to say the right way, but just the better way. There's a bunch of people in this circle. And so I'm super excited because you do what I'm doing. I feel like you're at an advanced level. You've been on your purpose and mission longer than I have, like unfocused. I'm been unfocused, but you're on it. Tell me what you're seeing out there in the sales world. Dale: It's wild out there, bro. And I like how you put that. I'm not trying to do it the right way or the perfect way, right? But just a better way. Every time I've looked at anything inside of my sales career, I've said why don't we do it this way? And that's what the sales rebellion is, right? It's this idea of sitting back and saying, not ah, screw the man and we're punk rock and we're not going to do anything you say and shave our heads and get tattoos. Even though I have all those things are probably prevalent in my life at some point. But the idea is that. There's no hope in the sales world right now, and there hasn't been for years. The idea has just been like, how do we herd the cattle into the bullpen and get the A players being A players and the B players being C players and the C players replaced at some point. There's always been this ecosystem inside of the sales world that is just as obnoxious to me. So what I'm seeing in the sales world right now is this idea of the revolution of the rebellion where people are looking at what they're being told to do and then seeing this idea of, wait a second. I don't have to ask somebody for 15 minutes on their calendar. I can just say. Do you want to get together with me and that works? I can have a genuine and authentic conversation with somebody. I can tell somebody that, hey, this is a cold call and I'm not really good at these. But what I am good at is I'm good at connecting people with, a service or a solution that makes their business better, puts them in a place that's more successful. And I did this and this kind of research on your company and figured that we might be a good fit. I can have that conversation instead of talking about my products and services and pushing you into an appointment with me, right? And as people have slowly started to have this realization around the authentic side of a person, the ability to be vulnerable, the ability to be a little bit more psychologically driven around conversation and not so much bullish or bullish around conversations that they're unlocking things for themselves. Because it's more than just fulfillment that they're getting from selling a product. In those cases, it's the fulfillment of being who they truly are and want to be to begin with, bro. How many times have you had a conversation with somebody? Cause it's been thousands for me that has said, I suffered through sales. I suffered through it, but maybe they sold a good amount of money, product and service and made an amount of money. But they'll tell you I suffered through it, bro. Jason: Yeah. They've suffered mentally, financially, the ups, the downs. Didn't feel an alignment. I see a lot. It's interesting you're talking about, which I've never heard you say, and I've never heard put that way, but that there's no hope in the sales community, in the sales world. Because people don't feel in alignment, right? There's what's true and authentic for that person. And then there's what they're taught or what you should do or the people you're supposed to follow after or the movies that you watch that show salespeople doing sales. Stuff to people and you're like, okay, if I'm not doing it like that, then I must be doing it wrong. And then the books and the gurus and the people out there teaching the tactics and the tricks and those traps and how do I trap somebody into this like sale, and then how do I use this close and this tactic versus, okay. What's just like you said, I love that cold call approach, which I've used before along those lines, which is. I'm not good at cold calls. I think I can help you. Are you interested in talking for more time? It's just two people, right? It's two humans. Dale: Yeah, absolutely. And because I think that what's missing in sales and the piece of the puzzle that people need to start going into, and that's extremely important for not just themselves, but for the community in general, that which the community they serve, the sales community as well too, is that we get away from this concept of manipulation and of forcing somebody into something. Right now there are groups out there that are just absolutely trash. And it's not because I said so, it's because when you click on the comment section, Of their ad campaign that has like a million views. You've got 90 percent of people in there going, your customer service sucks. You tricked me, right? Like you're saying, I did this because it looked like you had something good. And I've been fooled because that's it. That's the unlock. It's if you can get a million people to spend 10, you just made a lot of money. And then you can make everybody think that you are something that you're not in the first place. So hope in sales is important because, and that's what the rebellion is built on. We are built on hope, right? We are built on this concept of that sales professionals have built castles over the course of their career. Castle is a place that keeps people out, right? It's dark inside and damp. There's rooms that haven't been visited in years. There's more dust than your mom would ever really care that you had in the first place, like in a living space. And it's embarrassing in there in some cases too, and you don't want to show people those things. So you just hide up at the top of it and you throw down your hundred dollar bills every once in a while on a fancy dinner or a new car just to make sure people know you're still out here. We challenge salespeople to tear down those castles, right? And I think that if people can sit back and recognize the concept of a community as a kingdom, where we're enabling each other and we're enabling others before ourselves, that it's not even about the fulfillment of that. Even it's about the destiny that we create inside of that. Because that person that we just enabled is going to touch even if it's 10 people in their lifetime that we'll never see to begin with. And if we could have a vision that's bigger, instead of just saying here's my list and this is my territory and this is my ICP and I need to say this thing every time I talk to somebody to book an appointment and get a sale. But if instead we looked at our territory as a community. Our rusted old leaky pipeline is a living pipeline, right? If we started to just change the dynamic of our mindset alone and our focus, I believe that the sales world would turn into something that none of us would recognize in a good way. Jason: One thing I've seen is that sales people worry about only being able to win if they use manipulation tricks, tactics, and hard closes. So they end up struggling to close deals. Make their quota or earn the kind of money that they want to make. If this sounds like your current situation, or maybe you want to make more money in sales without feeling like you're selling, then my upcoming book called Selling with Authentic Persuasion will help. In it, I'm going to take you on a journey to transform from order taker to quota breaker. If you're ready to become an authentic persuader, crush your goals and create success in your sales career, then go to Jason cutter. com again, that's Jason cutter. com and pre order the book today, as you're talking about it. And you're talking about the community, both obviously in the, let's say the physical realm or the pipeline realm or like the prospect realm of the community, but then the community within sales themselves. One of the things that I've always seen in organizations that might not be the healthiest. Is the top salespeople don't want to share what they're doing because they don't want anyone else to figure it out because they think that might cut into their success. And I think when you're talking about it, what I've focused on for the longest time is abundance versus scarcity. Seven plus billion people on the planet. There's no reason everyone in sales can't help lift everybody up because there's enough. Dale: Agreed. A hundred percent. I love what you just said. Abundance is so important in our lives. Abundance is so important in our lifestyle in general, not just our sales culture and walk abundance in the way that we look at our marriage or our relationship with our significant other abundance in the way that we look at our daughter or our son or with our parents that we are a daughter or a son to as well. Abundance in all things and abundance mentality is what creates gratitude inside of your walk. Gratitude is so important. If we sit around being negative all the time and looking at everything and sitting back and saying, I don't have enough of this. Because I live in scarcity. It's hard to be grateful. It's hard to think that you have a life that's deserved in the first place. And it's not even about abundance with things, is what I'm saying though, too. It's not about having the fancy car, the nice house, right? Because you can have abundance through relationships. You can have abundance through the idea that every day you get to talk to your best friend, even if it's for a minute. Every day I got to go to work with my dad from 2007 until 2012 when he sold the business. And then after that he took a seat in the bullpen and I still got to see him until he passed away in 2016. And he worked all the way until five months before he died. So it was 2015, it was November. He was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and he even still came into the office for a couple weeks. It was pretty wild, dude. And then after that, it was just, he started hitting the hospital and not being able to come in. But his drive was interesting, right? I don't tell this story a lot, but I think it might be appropriate for this conversation, which is that one day he called me into the bedroom. I've told a few of these stories, like where he calls me in and gives me a task. And they were epic, bro. But this one in particular was amazing because he pulled out a notepad. And imagine a notepad with 99 pages. And 98 of them are flipped over and they're full and they have little lines marked through names. And the last page, the 99th page that he handed me had about three people on it and he had little notes next to each one and he called me in the room and he said, these are the last three people I need to help. It's crazy. It's powerful. It was impacting to be at the end of a man's life and to have him humbly sit before you and say, I will not be. And the moment that I leave until these people have been served, because I've committed to them, I've given them my word. I'll tell you, the last one was the hardest. I went to her house, I grabbed her old copier, I gave her the new one, and it was so funny, bro, I hope my owners of my company are listening to this, because they're probably like, whatever happened to that copier? My dad did this deal where he basically threw the machine into another deal and paid for it. To give to this person and then he kept it off of the books kind of thing from the perspective of service and whatnot. So it just disappeared. The copier just disappeared. It was paid for, but it just typically you wanted everything to have some kind of service contract or number that you could trace back to it. So you could sell that person something at some point, whether it was toner or service, whatever. And I rolled up to her house and I knocked on the door and she said, gosh, it's so good to see you. And she had just lost her husband. And I walked in and I said, I'm bringing you a new machine. Cause she thought I was fixing hers and I took it out and I brought the new one in and she just, we sat there and just cried. It was amazing. What an experience. It's hard to talk about, but it's, I rejoice in those moments. Because how many salespeople sit around and think that those are the types of things that have defined their sales walk. Most salespeople sit around and go, I hit precedence clubs 16 times in a row. And those are their bragging rights. I got to be able to be a part of the bigger picture of a man making an impact on a community that will never be the same because of what he did. Jason: All right, everybody, that's it for part one of my conversation with Dale. He does amazing stuff. Please make sure to check him out. You can find him at the sales rebellion.com as well as on LinkedIn. Also, you can go to cutter consulting group. com slash podcast and find the show notes. And I will see you on the next part. That's it for another episode of the sales experience podcast. Thank you so much for listening. If you find yourself on iTunes, can you leave the show a rating and a review? It helps other salespeople and sales leaders find the show and please subscribe to the show and share episodes you find valuable with anyone you know in sales. Help me on my mission of changing the way. Sales is done. And if you're ready to work together, go to Jason cutter. com. Again, that's Jason cutter.com to find out how I can help you or your company creates scalable sales success. I will see you on the next sales experience podcast episode, and keep in mind that everything in life is sales and people will remember the experience you gave them.