This week’s podcast guest is James Buckley. He’s a familiar face on the podcast and we were lucky enough to spend some time with James as a team before recording this episode.

James “SayWhatSales” Buckley is that guy you see on every social media feed you’ve got. He’s a Sales practitioner who is growing a killer team at RingLead, as well as the Uncrushed podcast host. He’s spent a ton of time in SalesForce and helps Sales teams get the absolute best from their instance of the CRM, making sure data is clean and ready to be used properly.

In this podcast you’ll Learn:

How James built his personal brand

How to keep consistent with content production

What a winning sales mentality looks like

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Sales mentality and mental health

John Barrows: So before we even get into any business at all, let’s talk about the important stuff which is what you’re doing right now with Uncrushed. Talk to us a little bit about that in the podcast and everything else.

James Buckley: Absolutely. So I’m on the podcast. You had asked me, I remember you said, “how do you stay so positive” and you and I are friends. So I’ve always felt really comfortable talking to you and I don’t know what possessed me to say it, but I said, man, I could be dead right now. And you’re like, what? Tell me a little bit about that really quick. I said that, uh, you know, if you flash back 10, you know, I’m going to say 15 years ago would be safe if you flash back 15 years. I was living in Miami with a major cocaine problem. It and it nearly killed me. I was constantly doing it. I was selling it so I could do it for free. Uh, it was, it was all my life.

I couldn’t stop it. It was just consistent. Every day. I had an accident at work and I went to a hospital and they did an x ray and showed my heart and my chest. It was about this big, and he said, that is your heart and at any moment it could rupture and you could die and there’s nothing that anyone in this building could do to save you. You’d be dead in about eight seconds. The very next day I rented a truck, packed everything I owned on it and moved to Tennessee and it was the best thing I ever did. I’ve been off of cocaine now for 13 years. Awesome. Um, and I went back to college and got a degree and really turned my life around. So when you asked me that, because you and I have the relationship we do, I was very comfortable telling you about it and just completely lost sight of the fact that the world would skew like 30,000, 40,000 downloads on a monthly basis.

So that happened and one of the people that sell it listened to it was Tim Clark of salesforce and him and I immediately connected right away and he was like, your story was touching. And it really made a lot of sense to me. And you know, it’s part of what’s I’ve been thinking about is this uncrushed kind of mentality and uncrushed the concept of uncrushed is that we’re constantly telling people to crush their goals and crush their day and go out there and crush it, whatever it is.

Establishing your personal brand

James Buckley: We want to be a person that somebody knows about. They know your organization because they follow me. I can’t tell you how many people came to me and were like, oh, cirrus insight. Yeah. James Buckley works for them. Right? I follow James on LinkedIn. I see all his stuff, great stuff. I love this stuff. He puts out, how do I get in touch with them? Like people, Hey, I met this person at a show and they asked me about you. So here’s their card. And you’d call them and say, Hey, I heard you met my friend at a show and they’d be like, Oh my God, James is calling me. And you kind of feel like that celebrity thing going right. That is because they’ve positioned themselves to be an authority figure in the space they’re working in. And for me that’s the true sign of a personal brand that is successful. Okay. So, for me, I started #saywhatsales after I came up with this thought of what our sales cycles tend to look like. So like I went through Google. You can go, you can go to Google if you’re out there listening, go to Google right now. Select images and then type in sales funnel.

There are millions of them and they’re all different and they all have this kind of like huge intricate web of things that are coming in through the funnel and the, the little segments have like little, but in reality I’d find that the one that works the best, it’s very easy. It’s very simple and that sucks to say when you’re, you have an audience of salespeople that are like, man, sales is really hard. That’s true. It’s hard. But if you look at your sales cycle, what you really have are six basic steps. We just complicate it with all our expectations and our biases and the things that we think are going to happen that don’t we end up let down because they don’t. Right? But in reality, your sales cycle only has six steps. Content is the road to connection. That connection should lead to a conversation.

Content and consistency

James Buckley: 2% of people actually create original content. Everybody else is either repurposing it or commenting on it. Sharing. Everybody has a fear of entering a saturated space and just adding to the noise. Yeah. I’m afraid it’s an excuse. It’s a straight up escape. It’s one of the many, many excuses that people give. So if it’s that saturated, why is it that people can get a good strong start? We see this all the time. They get a good strong start. They make a list, right? They have maybe 10 videos, maybe 10 concepts, maybe 10 things. Maybe you see them once a week for 10 weeks.

But after that, gone just like that. And it’s because that lack of consistency, that part of it is what builds a brand. If you’re that person that wants to build a brand, but you’ve only thought two videos ahead or 10 videos ahead, guess what? You’re not building a brand, what you want to do is make a statement. You want to stir the pot, that’s what you want to do. And there’s a lot of people out there that are really good at that. If you want to build a brand though, like you know, consistency and presence is everything. Every video that I have, almost every video ends with #saywhatsales. If you’re a salesperson, we’re the same person. Yup. And as a result, that phrase is very well known. Now people yelled it to me at shows, which is crazy, right? But it’s a brand now. It’s a thing that exists on a plane that I never imagined it would. I really just wanted to help sales people. I wanted to document my journey. I agree with you about consistency, but I think that I think the most important thing about brands and to be successful in building yours is authenticity. Because if you’re trying to be someone else, people will see right through that. If you’re somebody or if you’re a different person on LinkedIn than you are on Facebook, people will figure that out. If you’re this gregarious, passionate person and then somebody meets you at a conference and you’re a Dick you’re back to square 1.

John Barrows: There’s plenty of people I know, like you and I both know people that look like they’re awesome. They’re super nice and all that other stuff and they’re sharing really good stuff and then they’re a complete raging a*****e. Those are people I’ve stopped following. Those are the people that I, you know, I kind of roll my eyes at when I see them out there these days. And most people do because you and I could have a conversation. I can list 10 people that you and I both know that are not authentic with their approach. I think we would have the same lists.

That’s a wrap. Join us next time

If you made it this far, you’re the best. Thanks for reading and listening to this podcast. We hope you gained a ton from it and will listen in next week too.

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