Jonathan Pritchard, CEO of Hellstrom Group | Fortune 500 Mentalist

The only podcast you need for your business, let's do this. Welcome to the sales versus marketing podcast. I'm your host, Scott. Join me as we explore and demystify the latest trends, technologies and strategies used to achieve massive growth in 10x businesses. I'll be sitting down with sales, marketing, and business leaders. The sect, what's worked for them, the spell myths, and deliver actionable insights that you can use to ensure repeatable, sustainable, and predictable revenue in your business. Welcome to the sales versus marketing podcast where we speak with sales, marketing, and business leaders. I am your host, Scott. And today we are speaking with Jonathan Pritchard, who is the CEO, founder, and partner at the Hellstrom Group. So Hellstrom Group is a consulting agency. They work with Fortune 500, Fortune 100, very large enterprise companies on the sales negotiation, presentation, and influence. Their core value prop is their ability to reframe the use of business psychology to effectively just scale, secure more leads, sell more, convert more, drive more revenue. So they're a very impressive consulting group. But I'd like to bring it back to Jonathan, who I'm going to pass it over to in a second, and he's going to give an even better description, and I'm going to try and do him justice. So Jonathan is what's considered a Fortune 500 mentalist. So he is extremely adept at the psychology of business and the ability to influence through, through pride and true and tested psychological practices, understanding how to get into the target client's mind and build a relationship. Jonathan, he's a keynote speaker. He's acted as an event MC and a Master of Ceremonies for a variety of corporate and private events speaking on business psychology and influence. He is an author of the best selling book, like a mind reader. He is also a corporate trainer as he acts as a principal trainer for the clients at the Hellstrom Group works with. So Jonathan is an extremely interesting individual. Obviously, also an entrepreneur by trade and a very successful one at that as Hellstrom has worked. Like I just mentioned, with some of the largest Fortune 500 enterprise clients that's out there. So I'm really excited to speak with him. His perspective on business is unique, and the way that he delivers is something that I think a lot of people can use to effectively communicate both internally within their organization to help build relationships between stakeholders within, but also to effectively communicate with their customers. But I digress, I'm going to pass it over to Jonathan. So Jonathan, take it away, give us a little bit of your background, what you've done with your life to Katey to this point, and what is Hellstrom Group do for their customers? You got it. My name is Jonathan Pritchard. I'm based in Chicago, Illinois, when I'm not on the road. So I was like to say, I get my mail in Chicago, but I basically live on the road. I travel a lot for my work. I'm the founder of an international consulting company called the Hellstrom Group. Basically, I knew the best of the best world class people at what they did found a lot of overlap and opportunities to send them business and went, why don't we just make this official? And I'll kind of band it together to form that group. My background is as a touring mentalist. So basically, I'm top 1% in the world at magicians who graduated to mind reading tricks. And I don't have the mojo, I don't have the voodoo. It's all just applied psychology, showmanship, and moxie, which is kind of the secret cocktail of the business world now is influence and experiential marketing. It's like, well, yeah, I've been doing that since I was 13 years old. So let me get a cut of that. And that's a great story. And obviously, you're speaking about some of the things that you do as a mentalist and obviously somebody who has been in business for a while, like, oh, yeah, that's how I influenced my customers. It makes a lot of sense like it's to the hopskipping and jump away. So how did you figure out that your skill set carried weight in a business context? And then you made something out of it. Part of it was no joke, seeing business gurus and consultants being paid a lot of money, making up terms about stuff they don't actually understand, like that's legit what it was. Because they were like, I'm a master of influence. I'm a master of communication was like, wait a minute. Have you stood on stage in front of how he Mandel melby, Heidi Klum, Howard Stern and put a paper bag over Nick Cannon's head in front of 3,000 people and successfully pulled off lying to them? No, then I don't think you understand communication as well as I do. So a lot of it was, wait a minute, yeah. What I'm doing on stage definitely can apply in the business world. Oh, okay. And there was a lot more that went into that. But specific to the business realm, part of it was seeing so much research being referenced that was done in the 70s or 80s, like, okay. Even if that research was rock solid, that's maybe 20 or 30 years old. My tradition and what I've been doing basically is a body of knowledge and experiential library that goes back to before written history. So if you're going to talk experience and background in depth of knowledge, okay, I actually have some stuff to share with the world that's worthwhile. So you obviously took a while to build out like a business concept that would actually allow you to monetize the skills up. And now what you do with with House from Group is you're doing both. So when you look on your LinkedIn, you are a mentalist and you still I go on your website and I see you're still doing your shows and whatnot. And I think you even say like, you know, from 9 to 5, I'm consulting like 4,500 enterprise. And then after that, I'm, you know, you're doing, I don't know, putting on a show, I feel like that's kind of late. I don't want to just count what you're doing. Exactly. That's the tough balancing act is if you lead with, I'm a mentalist, people go, oh, you're trained monkey and you dance for your dinner, okay, here's a quarter. Or if you say I'm a world class business consultant that works with BP State Farm United Airlines, they go, oh, can you help me with my million dollar problem? Why yes, I can. How did you get into this? I'm a mentalist. Wait a minute. What? Right? So it's that kind of balancing act that I do. So I like to say that by day, I train corporate audiences by night, I entertain them. So really everything I do centers around helping my clients connect with their people. So if you are looking for somebody to write code, if you're looking for somebody to provide a technological solution, I'm not your guy. But if your business interacts with a human being, which is every, yeah, at some point is every business. But yeah, that's you. Exactly. A psychological insight to a particular problem or opportunity is often just as or if not more valid than a technological solution. But since you can see tech, you can buy an app and go, well, it wasn't on my home screen and now it is. You have that tangibility, even if it's abstract code, that you don't have with a piece of understanding. So that detail is something that I learned working at a magic shop in universal studios. So this was before Harry Potter World was there and grew in the magic game for fake magicians like me, right? So so we were like a four or five person team, third party vendor who the owner of the magic shop was renting space from universal weekend, week out. We were consistently the highest grossing third party vendor in the universal studios park. They just straight up people from all over the world who were there to have fun at an amusement park and ride roller coasters. We were selling the magic hand over fist. So that taught me a lot about international sales and communication, rapport building, just basically everything about business I learned from working at that magic shop and seeing the right way to do it. But to the point I was making is there's this really weird thing called the burden of knowledge. It's very difficult for you to remember what it was like to not know something. I've heard that. I've heard that concept before. So to take yourself out of that and to put you're in the shoes of somebody who's buying from you or whatnot, that's the missing link that you try and exactly is it. It's really difficult because here's here's what happens. So in the magic context, some magic demonstrator me would do a really simple magic trick, but it looks like magic and you as not the magician have zero ability to evaluate its difficulty. So I'm there assuring you no, no, a seven year old child could do it. Hey kid, do this and then the seven year old kid pulls off the trick and then the adult's going, oh man, that's my kid and I know he's not bright, so my kid could do it. I could do this. So they buy the magic trick and sometimes it'd be $50, $100 magic trick, right? So not something that's cheap. They are going holy cow, this is so amazing. It is so perplexing, I have to know how this works. I will never figure this out. They fork over the hundred bucks, then they buy the instructions and it's on a single sheet of paper. They read the instructions. They now have the knowledge of how it works. And instantly the first thing they say is, this will never fool anybody. It happens that fast, boom, you now know how it works and you go, and I want my money back. No, this wasn't it, right? So that takes shape so many different ways in business, right? The old business trope of a multimillion dollar company goes down and they're being held up and they're losing millions and millions of dollars a minute and then this guy comes in and taps a machine once and now it's back up and running. He goes, that'll be $10,000 and they go, you only tapped it once and that took you less than 30 seconds. Why are we paying you $10,000? He's like, all right, so $1 for the hammer, $9,999 for knowing where to tap it. So that's a great point. So it's the years of experience that allow somebody to be able to do that. And when you're a consultant, just to wrap up and sort of summarize what you're alluding to, if I don't want to put words into your mouth, so let me know. But you buy a piece of tech, it keeps working, you buy a consultant, you solve the problem and then now that consultant loses their value. So in the business world, maybe this is something that would be outside of just what you do and would be good for listeners, how do you maintain that perceived value so that even though they know that you can do the magic trick or make them a million plus dollars, they're still going to keep hiring you again and again and again. Right. A big, a big part of helping people understand how to appreciate you is having them, it's called anchoring, have them admit they can't solve the problem, right? I also teach Kung Fu, like that's one of my passions. And what I love about it is you can't argue with somebody punching you in the face. That's probably the biggest knowledge nugget I've, it's true, yeah. I don't care how you feel about it, I don't care how good your debate skills are, I don't care how reasonable you're being, if somebody's trying to punch you in the face, there's only one thing to do and that's to move, that's to do something about it, right? So in the world of martial arts, if you just talk about martial arts, oh, well, what would you do if somebody punched you with the right hand? You could deflect it. Okay. But then I would do this and now you're seven year old kids, be like, no, take back these invisible force fields, right? And you're just talking about this stuff that doesn't actually mean anything. So then really the only way for a new person to understand they don't know martial arts is to just throw down in a safe way that isn't actually going to damage them or hurt them, but have a context for them to try their best and realize it's nowhere near good enough. But only then, once their tea cup has been emptied of what they think they know, you have to let them come to that point of, yeah, there's no way I could beat this guy. There's no way I could solve this problem. I've been trying to solve this problem for six months, two years and I still have it. It's kind of like the alcoholic, alcoholics anonymous first step is admitting your power list against whatever it is, right? So that step one is your client has to know that they can't solve the problem you can solve and anchor that with some sort of for you, it could be a ritual of, okay, how long have you been working with this? What have you tried doing this? Well, what would be your best plan to solve it from here? And then have them admit in some way that, yeah, I don't know, or it'll take too long, just them admitting, yeah, I don't have any clue. And that's when you have that value and that's when you can go and like, I don't, how did you learn this? Because you don't have an upbringing in a classical business world. So all this stuff you're saying is very valid and you're bringing in all these analogies from Kung Fu and magic, which are all very relevant. But like I just, I want to know how you connected the dots because I find it like really interesting because I don't think, like I've always worked in an organization and that's how I understand it. But if I was coming from the type of environment that you were, I don't know if I could connect those dots and then tie them back to a skill that I could actually monitor. That's what I find super impressive that you've done, like successfully. Thank you. A lot of it is, think of it like this. My first paid gig was when I was 13 years old to do magic tricks at a company's summer picnic for their employees and family. So I got paid $200 to walk around the lawn and do magic tricks for people. $200. I was like, awesome, I'm never working a day in my life. This is fantastic. So kind of like my first corporate opportunity was then, like who cares about child labor laws, right? So that was, that was what I was 13 years old. Right now I'm 36 years old, all right. So we do the math, carry the one that's more than 20 something years of doing this. If I've not had like normal nine to five trajectory. So since I was 13 years old, I've essentially had eight hours a day to myself to do whatever I want. And over that time, if you kind of carry it out, I've essentially had something like 45, 42,000 hours to myself. So if you're going by the 10,000 hour rule, I've had four and a half lifetimes worth of time on my own to get good at whatever I want, right? Yeah. So it's kind of like I'm, I'm four and a half lifetimes old. That's how I don't know. I read voraciously, I talk to just the coolest, smartest people I could possibly find and find places that we overlap, places where we differ. How do you think about this? Yeah, I'm, I'm rapidly curious and I'm more of a find similarities and connections than I am differences really. Yeah. So when I read one thing, I go holy crap, that reminds me of these 11 different things and each of those, and it's this geometric progression. You're, you're right on that because if you start, if you read, if you, if you speak to see your leaders, if you listen to the pocket, whatever, you'll start to notice trends in things that work and you start to tie those things together. It doesn't matter, you know, you can read any book you really want on sales or marketing or whatever and you'll start to see repeating trends and whatnot. So that's kind of what you're, what you're saying now, like you just see those trends repeated and you apply. So, um, health from group, when you're working with clients, you're speaking about connection, is it, uh, I'm, I'm looking at your website too as we do this, um, so I have a little bit of context. So you speak about engagement, equalification, training, um, is, is the connection with internal with employees, is it with external stakeholders, customers, um, what, is it, so explain like when you go in, like what do you, what do you do for a company? Yeah, that, that if I, if I, it can be so humble is the genius of it, um, because really human connection is the most powerful force in your life, separate from business because to me, business is just life with dollars thrown in. So that, that's it. Really, good business is good relationships. Good relationships are predicated on good communication skills. That's it. So the more effective you are as a communicator, the higher quality connections you can have with other people, like that's it. So internal employee satisfaction is usually a function of the leadership's ability to communicate their actual values, not just their stated values. So every company has stated and actual values. The ones with integrity, alignment, right, fully integrated, those are the same thing. What we say we value and what we actually behave in alignment with are those values. However, most companies don't, we value honesty, yeah, but Carl's been stealing my sales for the past six months. Oh, well, we can't do anything about that because he's our top sales person. He's our top sales person because he's been stealing my commission for six months. Yeah, well, we wish we could do something about it, right? So there's the stated and actual. On the external side, companies have phenomenal opportunity to connect with their clients, their perspective clients. For me, my favorite way to help companies are companies that exhibit at trade shows. So they are investing tens of thousands of dollars to reserve a 10 by 20 booth, have the booth designed and created and shipped and made and installed all that kind of stuff. They're doing all the print material. Then they're bringing four or five sales people there to stand in the booth, putting them up, feeding them, like just the whole nine yards, fly the hell all that stuff. It's expensive, yeah. Yep. And then this marathon that they've been working on for months, they trip up at the last yard and with it's with this belief, the attendees are at the trade show anyway. They're going to stop in and say hi, right? That's like booking the fishing trip, going down there, getting on the boat, having your pole and then going, we don't need bait. The fish will just jump into the boat, yeah, or get on that. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So the way that I help fair is super niche. So what I do, well, I got to back up when I was 13, right, is doing the walk around magic stuff. I also learned how to juggle fire that summer, which was super cool. That is very cool. That is very cool. Yeah. It's like, I have great parents, they're phenomenal parents. So then what I would do is I would go to the nearest city, which was Asheville. So Asheville, North Carolina, Asheville. So then I would go to just downtown, beyond the sidewalk, I would juggle fire a crowd would build. Then I would do kind of a magic show. That was before I specialized in mentalism. So I would do a magic show where I borrow a dollar to disappear and then comes back in the lemon that I was juggling eight minutes ago, that kind of a thing, right? So then I would pass my hat and then that was party money. That's exactly what I'm doing at trade shows. So I take up a three by three square in their booth as their attraction. So kind of their mascot for hire, their spokesperson. So I work with the marketing and sales team to really understand what makes you guys different. What makes you better? What are your key marketing messages that you want to communicate that you can use to pre-qualify your leads? Okay. Then I custom script a presentation for them. So then at the top and bottom of every hour, I stand up on there and I get two people to walk over and then those two people, somebody else is looking at them and I, yeah, don't be shy. Come on. She's about to win $100. What? So now we've got five people and then, yeah, come on in, yeah, you're going to want to see this. You're all going to have a chance to win a hundred bucks and you're just like, okay. So now you've got 15, 20 people. Then I transition into the carefully scripted corporate presentation that mixes mind reading and amazement that you simply can't forget. It is unbelievable and then we sneak in the corporation, right? We sneak in the message. So the messaging and the branding are inseparable from that unforgettable experience. So then, I was going to say that's genius. I love where this is going and I think it's a super cool idea. So keep going. It is really cool and then I go and thank you so much. That is all I have for you. However, these guys have some free giveaways for you that you can use to fool the people at the bar tonight. It'll be great. You're going to have a great time. So if this, what we talked about is up your alley, then come on over and talk to these guys. If not, here's your free Chachki. I'd love to see you later. So what that does is it attracts a greater percentage of the attendees. It delivers the message to a greater number of people and it pre-qualifies so that the sales team isn't wasting their time one-on-one before realizing that this isn't an ideal lead. So my clients regularly are telling me, before you, we were getting maybe a third, maybe 25% as many leads and all the only difference is we now work with you. That's amazing. That's a pretty good review if you want to social proof right there. I can see why that because trade shows are so boring when you're walking around, everyone's the exact same. Nobody looks any different. The only one that does look different is the one person that spends instead of a couple thousand dollars, a couple million dollars and they just rent out a whole floor and that's not replicable, that's not scalable, right? So I get what you're doing now. Is there a way outside of being a mentalist for somebody to still be more effective at trade shows than and what would your suggestion be for that? Some sort of active strategy for engaging attendees and understand the mind flow of the decision making of an attendee as you approach them because the things that are going to get you the greatest numbers are going to be the worst pre-qualifiers for follow-up. So that is an inverse proportion. The better qualified a lead is for you, the fewer of them you're going to get, right? So there's no way around that equation, e equals mc squared, good lead equals time and effort expended, right? So most people's lead generation strategy for a trade show is, hey, did you put your business card in the fish bowl for the drawing of an iPad after this? Yeah. Like, anybody in their mom is going to want an iPad and then they're just going to, oh, yeah, that email spam as you follow up, right? So you get tons of leads and they're all garbage. So understand how an attendee is thinking, like I am so bored, I wish somebody would just say hello to me as a person. So landing a lead and getting quality leads is kind of like trying to grab a dandelion fluff, right? So I grew up at the mouse North Carolina, so you blow the dandelion fluff around and then it ruins your lawn, but you're a kid and you don't care about that kind of stuff. But if you reach for it directly, the pressure wave in front of your hand pushes it away because you're trying too hard. But if you see which way it's blowing, just kind of put your hand there, it'll land there. So you just have to be a human being who takes the initiative to not have such a direct aggressive stance because you don't want to push them away, but then you don't want to be too passive. So the way I've kind of approached it is, connect with them as a human being first. It's totally disarming. It's sad, but it's true. And what you're saying is a strategy, obviously, you're building that out as a trade show strategy. But what you're saying, I'm sure if you've worked on larger campaigns, you communicate the same message because regardless of if it's on social, if it's on a cold call, it's on a cold email, if that a trade show, if you're human with the person, it's just going to be a better experience for the customer, like 10 out of 10 times, and people just don't get this. So that probably brings you back to teaching people how to communicate properly. Right. And just be genuinely interested in other people and open to the experience of that other person beyond the social protocol of how are you doing good? Actually, my wife just divorced me because she's cheating on me with my brother and now Thanksgiving's coming up, but I didn't actually want to know about that, but if that's what happens, then go, that must, that must be a tough spot right now. So how are you even here right now if that's what you got going on? And now you're right back on track, right? She's like, wow, you're resilient. So you got to make those numbers. What kind of numbers are you looking at? Okay. Well, what's the biggest thing other than everything you got dealing with back home, but what's the situation because I can't help you there, but actually, I have, I have some thoughts for clients who have been in a similar situation in your business. So here's what I'm thinking, then they go, man, you just explained that better than I ever could. And I've been in that, that situation for two years. And at least the one thing got for a bit, my wife's cheating on me with my brother, but at least my business isn't going down to the toilet anymore. Exactly. Step one, lawyer up real good like and then, and then start working on your business. Do you think, do you think the trade shows are one of the most mishandled opportunities in terms of companies marketing dollars spent overall? It very well could be, it very well could be because social media and social media advertising has been the new hotness for quite a while now. And influencer marketing and all that kind of stuff still garners a ton of money. However, it kind of seems like a lot of companies hear that, but then don't see the return on investment for their own stuff. So to me, trade shows are still the 500 pound gorilla of good business because there's even we are doing video chatting and I'm making good eye contact with you, right? So you know that I'm right here with you. I'm not looking at you, I'm looking at a camera. You, for me, is down here. So for me to make eye contact, I lose eye contact with you, right? So only, only in real meat space that is costly and cumbersome to deal with and to be there, it is so cost prohibitive that to actually be present in space with another human being, it's kind of a luxury, right? So a company that is going to exhibit at a trade show has the opportunity to meet tons and tons of people who are going to already by virtue of going to that flavor trade show, most likely be somebody that would be a good connection with you. So when done right, you basically can leapfrog a year or two's worth of cold calls and social media marketing and just wham in three or four days, you just made enough leads to float your business for the next year, right? So a lot of companies understand only the pressure side of it, holy crap, we are investing so much money in this, we have to get these leads out of this, we got to suck it dry, we got to get every drop of leads out of this, right? So then they come in with two aggressive approach and then you, you need what we got, yeah, you do come on in, you're like, yeah, no thanks buddy. So that's why having a professional presenter who can deliver your message, like I have it figured out a better analogy, but I don't like this one, that it's like a vaccine. So they're experiencing a show and fun and then they're secretly being delivered the payload, right? The marketing message, the brand that they that now is with them, like they can't forget it, right? So so when I do a good job for myself, attendees think that my client is so lucky to have an employee like me, boy, they sure lucked out by having Jonathan on their team, but every company wishes they had a Jonathan, I bet, because everybody thinks, oh, Carl's funny around the water cooler. So we'll just have Carl be our trade show guy, no man, no, it's like you might, you might go to five trade shows a year, like most businesses don't do 20 or 30, like DHL or, or like the United States Postal Service, like those huge businesses that go to every industry possible and they're doing 60 or 70 a year, we're not talking about them. But the companies that go four or five times a year, even if that guy has been going to trade shows for four or five years in a row, run the numbers, that's, okay, he's been to 20 trade shows, or you could go with the professional who does 50 a year for the past four or five years, hmm, okay, what's the better investment in your business? I don't even think, I don't even think a lot of people realize, because I've gone, I've gone to tend to trade, I don't know hundreds, probably quite a few trade shows over my, I didn't know the people like you even existed, so, exactly, exactly, it is, it is such an unheard of, yeah, Martian idea and it is like a secret weapon, so it is difficult to get clients to share the good news, no, we can't have you getting booked up, we have to have you at our trade show, so we don't want to get in a bidding war for your time, so we're not going to tell people how great you are. No, it's a very cool idea and I definitely do the value prop, I can totally see how it could be effective, just walking around trade show floors, like for me, that would bring me in, so, you know, what else, so you've doubled down on trade shows, that's kind of like the secret weapon that, what else does health from do, you focus on communication, you focus on obviously messaging and delivering that and obviously, you know, 10X companies experience or presence at a trade show, is there other facets that are part of, when I look on the site, there's a couple different things, you have a really strong team it looks like too. Thanks, yeah, I kind of see it as a slider, as entertainment and education, so where in that slider do you want it to go, are you hosting a conference and you want an end of conference gala and you want a Vegas level show, well, I have performed on the strip in Vegas, I am a Vegas level show, so I can be there to be the evening's entertainment doing a Broadway level interactive mind reading show that'll just knock everybody socks off, on the other end of that is the education and training piece of it, so doing training workshops, maybe a company one can't afford me or two, just wants me to teach their team how to be more engaging, so then one of one of our partners, Joe, Joe Friedman has been a corporate trainer forever, so his specialty is delivering two day workshops for up to 16 people on four topics, so you can book, book us to teach how to sell more effectively, how to negotiate more effectively, how to present more effectively, that's really good for CEOs, especially of startups, because you are the company and you're out there dancing for dollars, so if you're not a good presenter, I don't care how good your tech background is, if nobody can understand your value proposition, well then investors aren't going to find you, that's also useful for the engineering departments, he worked with the folks at craft in the engineering teams to teach the engineers how to communicate the value of their research so that it can get funded internally, so this isn't just outward sales, it's actually internal communications too, and the fourth one is just straight up influence, which is at the core of all effective communication. Would you say that that's so out of those four buckets with external or internal, is there like an underlying principle that sort of makes all these types of communication better? Absolutely, and I'm stealing it straight from Joe, which is principled persuasion, and our kind of also partnered David Zarin, that's who I've heard say that the most, so it's principled persuasion is really the turbocharger of effectiveness, so you are trying to persuade somebody to see things your way and to help them understand why working with you will be better than not working with you. That's really all communication is getting your way of seeing the world into somebody else's mind in a compelling way, because information delivery doesn't really do anything, like I knew I needed to work out, I knew I needed to eat better back when I was married, and I'm now not married anymore, she wasn't cheating on me, I promise you, I take 100% responsibility for my actions there, however, the information and knowledge of what I should be doing with my life was not nearly enough to persuade me into actually taking care of myself and living a better life, right? So yeah, so information delivery, if I just explain the facts, they can't say no, look. And it never works like that, obviously. Never works that way. So human beings are fundamentally irrational monkeys with suit jackets, and then we decide then we use logic to justify our decision making. So principled persuasion is understanding the fundamental mechanics of decision making and how human beings interact with fundamental reality on a pre-cultural level. So this is transcultural, it doesn't matter if you grew up in Europe or anywhere else, this is human nature, and then we help you understand how it applies to that specific culture. If you ever read the book Pitch Anything by Orrin Clath, it's all about tapping into the crocodile brain and tapping into deep rooted and neurological triggers, so it's similar to what you're saying, and the whole premise of the book is just he uses this to pitch it, multi-million dollar deals all the time, and you can confirm his close ratio or his close rate because he knows how to tap into all these underlying triggers that people have. Exactly. Exactly. Very cool. Okay, so that was really good. To be honest, we covered a lot of stuff. I wanted to go over a couple questions that I ask every time, just to people that are younger in their career, give them a little bit of insight as to how you got to where you were. So, if you were going to tell your 20-year-old self one lesson that you've learned, you can go back, what would that be? Allow yourself to let go of what you think you want in order to do what it is that will actually get you what you need. For a long time, I had the, I'm a performer, I'm an entertainer, I'm an artist, and this is what I do. I perform and I entertain on the stage, and that is my calling. That's what I've wanted to be since I was five years old, so this is what I'm doing. And I was doing all right, it's kind of performing at colleges, nobody knows who I am, right? It's just kind of like you don't have that star equality, right? So, I was limping along, barely making it, and then I allowed myself to even entertain the idea of maybe this corporate consulting thing isn't so bad, right? I'm not selling out, I'm buying in, so giving up the identity of entertainer and putting that down and allowing myself to say, I'm really good at helping people connect. In a fun, memorable, meaningful way, okay, that's actually what I'm good at. The shape that's taken until now is as an entertainer, however, that skill of helping connect people, that is massively valuable, and it was only at that point that I started actually doing more of what it was I was trying to do as an entertainer, more traveling, more cool friends, more cool opportunities, awesome clients, it's just super cool. So if you aren't getting what it is that you want, it's probably because you're trying to think about being something that isn't serving you well. And I think that that's the line that a lot of people are afraid to cross because if they don't cross it and they don't see it on the other side, they're like, oh, I'm giving up on my dream. Well, look at you. Now you've incorporated your dream and you've done it exponentially better than what you're doing before because you thought outside of this almost like blinders on vision that you had for yourself. So it's not giving up, it's just growing. And that's what I said. Yeah. Exactly. Convincing yourself, you're living the dream when it's actually a nightmare is psychotic. So if you're miserable living your dream, you've bought into that lie that you have to suffer for your art. It's like, nope, you don't have to. You're not helping anybody by not even being able to help yourself. Yeah. That's good. That's good. Okay. So within your industry, let's say your industry or your niches is helping people communicate. What are the biggest issues that you see with communication with either external or internal stakeholders that it's just like rampant and you wish it would stop yesterday? I wish I remembered who said this off the top of my head it would make me sound very witty, but quotes are a sufficient stand-in for whittiness. Said the biggest obstacle to communication is the illusion of it having happened. I said these words, therefore you understand what I'm pointing to. Nah man. Nope. I'm a world class communicator and I still have disagreements with my girlfriend. Okay. Right. Come on guys. And this is something else I stole from Joe because I heard it so much. You'd be like, professional communicators, everybody, please don't try this at home. Because even the even the world experience still screw it up. Yeah. So the fact that we're both speaking English is not enough qualification for being a good communicator. So being willing to ask more questions, even if you think you've asked enough, you haven't even started yet. So the person, let me, yeah, are we what are you looking for? I can't believe I don't have a deck of cards within arm's reach here. Right. If you if you want, I can, I got it. You got it. Yeah. There's a saying that most people have heard, but they don't understand it quite right. So you and I are going to go through a just a quick process of elimination. Okay. Don't don't think about just first thing out of your head. So if you're going to take the cards out of a card box and you can take out the black cards with red cards, which color would you take out? A red card. Okay. And if you were going to hand me the hearts or the diamonds, which would it be diamonds? Okay. See, hey, me the diamonds. Now do I throw the events or the odds down on the table? Events. Okay. So the events that they're on the table, half of them turned up like the low ones or the high ones, which turned face up? High. Okay. So we can see those. We're going to push them off because I want this to be totally random. So we got like the two, four and six there on the table and you pick up two. Which two would you pick up of a different like what suit of the of those diamonds there that's left? Because you got the two of diamonds, the four of diamonds in the. Which card? Yeah. Pick up the four. Four diamonds. Okay. And what other one? Two of diamonds. Okay. So you picked up the two of diamonds and the four of diamonds, which we've eliminated every other card except the six of diamonds that's there on the table, right? So that was totally free choice. You made every single choice that you wanted to, right? Yeah. Because you could, you could have changed your mind. You could have said anything else, right? Yeah. What's the card that I was holding before we started that? Yeah. Yeah. The six of diamonds. All right. All right. So you, you can do what you said you can do. So I can actually back it up. Now, how did that work? That's always people's first instinct is how did you do that? To me, more interesting is why does it work, right? But I do that to point home that the person asking questions is in control of the experience. So in a sales call, you have to ask tons of questions. The person answering like me, I'm the one that's been bloviating for an hour, but the person asking the questions is actually in control. The police officer interrogating the suspect, right? So how you ask the questions, when you ask them what questions you're asking helps the other person feel understood that you're taking the time to really get a good idea of how they're seeing reality and understanding their situation and then diagnosing the problem with a solution that will solve their problem. But if they go, hey, I need web design and you go, yep, we're it. Let's do it. Pay me. It's like, you don't even know what kind of website I'm going for right now, like I don't know enough, right? So the best way to improve your communication skills is to ask more questions. But that's super impressive. I'm still sorry. I'm still thinking. Is that going to figure out? You can't forget it. No, man. I can't. I can't. I can't figure out how the hell you did it either. So that's whatever. That's all good. Is there really a good thing? Basically, I'm, I'm, uh, Seth, that's it, uh, mind, mind control, Jedi mind tricks, whatever it is, man, that was a very, a very good trick. I like it. Um, but that's why I like say I'm a mentalist, not a magician because magicians do tricks with objects. Like if you pulled a card out, put it back in the deck and then there it is, whereas just holding one card and that's the card, like screw you, that's, that's amazing. Yeah. That is amazing. That is amazing. And so, so when you work with companies, when your sales force is like everything that you're doing, everything that you want to get out of a conversation, you're guiding them how to ask the right questions, listen, I know in sales, you ask a lot of questions. You want to ask the right questions, but I don't think I've ever seen a result as predictable as what you just did. So if you can, if you can codify that, you know, map it out and that's powerful. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. What I just did with you is exactly a successful sales call. Yeah. It's exactly the same thing. And, and it's a whole cocktail of applied psychology, right? Because there's absolutely no physical skill to what I just did other than being able to hold a single playing card. And it, and spoiler alert, it doesn't matter which of those playing cards I would have picked up. It would have been the one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So, so it's kind of like that, the, oh, the Batman movie, which one? The one with Bane, the Christian Bale, the Bane one. And then the guy's like, I'm in control here. And then Bane just puts his hand on the guy's shoulder and goes, do you feel in control? Right? So mentalism and a good sales call is providing the experience for the audience member or the prospect of being in control, but they land exactly where you want them to land. So it sounds evil, but it's not. It's principled persuasion. There you go. That wraps it. That wraps it. That brings it back. Okay. Well, that's, that's really all I got. I guess to, to finish it off, you've built a your own company. You're always trying to find new mentors and new places to learn, to grow. If people wanted to grow themselves professionally, where would you suggest they'd look at their books, people that you look to, audibles, podcasts that are, are relevant or really, really good that you enjoy? Funny enough, how to win friends and influence people is industry standard for a reason. It's, it's phenomenal. This is also where I will shamelessly plug my own book because I, I crammed 20 years of world traveling experience and doing this stuff into a single book as called Think Like a Mind Reader, which is basically the same 20 conversations that kept coming up after shows and engagements, same, same ideas, different details. So I was like, okay, this is resonating with people. So I put those into the book and it's, it's kind of how to win friends and influence people from the perspective of a professional people meter and mind reader. So there you go. Available on Amazon.com. I'll link it. I'll link it. I'll link it in the show notes. I don't mind. I don't mind that. So, thank you. No, my pleasure. And last, certainly not least, if they want to reach out to you or house from how do they do that? I genuinely want to hear from you. If there's the slightest inkling that you're like, I may be, I want to please say hi. Like I, I want to hear from you because I've had amazing mentors and weird connections that came to fruition six years after we first connected all that kind of stuff. So just go to healthstromgroup.com. It's, it's disgustingly easy to get a hold of me. If you just want to kind of be a fly on the wall or be in the passenger seat of a car ride for 14 hours, if you want that experience with me, just follow my Twitter. Okay. Twitter. Twitter is where I just put anything and everything that just passes my mind, the, the weird projects like, I'm in, what's the, what's the handle, what's the Twitter? V, C underscore, Pritchard. Okay. So, so that's, that's it. Yeah. It's like, I have a project that helps artists tokenize their digital artwork into crypto prints that are provably genuinely limited edition. Like, that's my art degree from college talking, right? Like, I just have all sorts of wacky stuff that I love working on and then I talk about all of it on Twitter. Okay. So yeah, that there, there's no segmenting. There's no silo. You, you get kung fu, crypto, computing, psychology, just wacky stuff there. So yeah, you've been four warns. Cool. Awesome. All right. We'll talk soon. Okay. Sounds good. So you heard it from the man himself the first ever podcast guest to, to do me with magic. He is, he is, he definitely practices what he preaches. He is a master of his art and it was a great interview. The his ability to leverage human psychology and, and merge that with true business processes is something that was, was very, very impactful to me. And I think that obviously that's why he's been so successful. This has been another sales versus marketing where we interview sales marketing and business leaders. I'm your host Scott and I really do hope you enjoyed this week's episode. If you haven't already, please hit like, please hit subscribe, leave some comments, leave some feedback. You can leave any rating you want as long as it's a five star rating. If you haven't already, please share this podcast with your friends, your family, your co-workers, your peers, anybody who you think you would have value, you can download the podcast wherever you can download podcasts, you can also go check it out on YouTube. And if you have any guests that you think should be on the podcast that I should interview, you can email me directly as Douglas Clary at gmail.com or LinkedIn dot com slash in slash s Douglas Clary and I will have them on the show. That's all I got for today. Everybody have a great week, have a productive week and we will talk again soon. Bye now. Welcome to Scott's thoughts where we dissect the interview we just had on the sales versus marketing podcast. So this week we spoke with Jonathan Pritchard and there's two points that he spoke about that I really want to drive home. So firstly, he spoke about the burden of knowledge. Why is this point so important? Well, quite simply, it's because you have to maintain your value as a company, as a founder, as a sales rep trying to pitch a product, you have to maintain that value. And Jonathan spoke about how we actually do that, how do we maintain value? Well, we have to help people see that they have a problem first. So traditional solution selling dictates that we're solving problems. You can also look at other sales models like the challenger methodology where you are actually positioning problems in the customer's business. They didn't even know they had. So to get over that burden of knowledge, you're not just solving a problem. You are re-enfor- you can be finding it for the customer and you can be reinforcing it. And extrapolating that concept into sales, imagine how impactful and how powerful it will be if you can understand and educate the customer on a problem they have in their business that either they weren't aware of or that they were aware of but they weren't aware of the impact of it. And then once they trust you and you've built that relationship and they know that you understand their business because you were able to help them realize the gravity of a problem they have. The next steps, it just so happens that you have a product or a solution that solves that problem and they will be the ones buying from you because you are the ones that presented the problem to them, cared enough about their business to find the problem and obviously are much more than just somebody pitching over a feature or a benefit or the lowest price you are now a consultant. The second piece that Jonathan spoke about was the missed opportunities at trade shows. So trade shows are obviously something that companies partake in but from Jonathan's experience and from my personal experience, it's a missed opportunity given the amount of money spent to get a booth, it can range from tens of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars and there's no extra emphasis given at the at the final stage when you can actually speak to customers, convert customers, everybody just assumes that because they're all at the trade show, they're going to be listening to your pitch. So what Jonathan speaks about, what his company actually does for companies is they do trade show lead generation. They position themselves at trade shows and give an experience to your customers walking around the trade show floor that they would usually not get from a sales individual or a product manager that works for the company because they've done this so many times, they know the best way to present and to engage with an audience. Now what you can do if you're not hiring Jonathan, which it's something to think about because obviously he's very good at what he does but if you aren't going to hire Jonathan to take away message here is trade shows are still an important industry event. It can be massively they can be massively beneficial in terms of leads and revenue but just have a plan on how to differentiate yourself on how to engage with customers on how to excite customers and on how to give them a memorable experience because you're getting FaceTime with them and that is something that in the digital age is very hard, very expensive to get. So when you have the opportunity to get FaceTime with a customer, don't waste it. Have a plan to actually give that customer an experience that is truly outstanding, remarkable and then obviously layer that with your corporate and your marketing messaging and your sales messaging and that will be a trade show worth spending money on and that will obviously lead to increased leads generated increased conversions and increased revenue. So that's some very helpful takeaways for people that are listening that engage in trade shows or that are thinking if you're a smaller company on how to make the most of my dollars spent to get the most return on my investment when I invest in a booth at a trade show. So those are two great takeaways. Both of them I haven't heard on this show yet. So that's why I wanted to reinforce and just speak to them. But anyways that's been another Scotch Thoughts, that's all I have today. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. As always have a great week, have a productive week and we will talk again soon. Bye now. 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