Welcome to episode #105 of the Morning Upgrade Podcast. In this week’s episode I spoke with Jeremy Miner, founder of Seventh Level.
Top Talking Points
- The importance of knowing your strengths and using them effectively.
- The benefits of reading as many books as you can.
- How to pick a strength you have and focus all your effort on improving it.
Resources & Links
Connect With Jeremy at SalesRevolution.pro and on Facebook.
Find The Books Mentioned on Kindle or Audible:
To Sell is Human by Daniel Pink.
Subscribe to The Morning Upgrade Podcast Today
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Morning Upgrade Podcast. If you enjoyed my conversation with Jeremy, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and please leave a review.
Episode Transcript
Announcer
Welcome to the Morning Upgrade podcast with Ryan Cote, where we feature casual conversations with entrepreneurs about personal development and growth.
Ryan
Hey, Jeremy, welcome to the Morning upgrade podcast. How’s it going?
Jeremy
Hey, you know, Ryan, thanks for having me on your show; I appreciate the opportunity. And let’s, let’s have some fun.
Ryan
Absolutely 100%. So let’s kick off by you telling everyone who you are and what you do for a living, and then give us a win happening in your life right now.
Jeremy
Yeah, so you know, I’m just the boring guy over here starting to stay out of trouble. But I’m Jeremy Miner. So I’m the founder and chairman of a company called Seventh Level. And we’re an organization that trains and helps sales professionals, coaches, sales executives, you know, sales management, business owners, entrepreneurs, really anybody that has a product or service, and we help them, I would say, really, by transforming the way they sell by learning specific skilled questions and techniques that actually work with human behavior, most people, you know, what does that actually mean? Rather than actually work against it. So we call that neuro-emotional persuasion questioning was the right tonality to put your prospects at ease, you know, eliminate sales pressure, and really triggers them to actually want to engage with you, right, like to want to open up to you and really gets them to really sell themselves. So that’s kind of what we do in a nutshell, we train, you know, fortune 100 companies, all the way down to SMB, all the way down to individual salespeople that really sell anything, and cheese, probably over 150 Different industries at this point. So a big win for me was, we were, well, there’s a lot of wins, but I just became a contributor for Inc Magazine. So I’m enjoying that process and writing a lot more. So I would say that was a good win that we just found out here a couple of weeks ago.
Ryan
Nice. Congrats. That’s a big one. Expand your reach.
Jeremy
There you go.
Ryan
So I’m never gonna ask you about we, uh, we interweave in the show between personal growth and business questions. So I’m going to definitely get back to you; I want to ask you for some tips around selling for my audience, of course. But let’s, let’s first talk about your morning; how do you start your mornings?
Jeremy
Well, so I’m kind of like a discipline freak; I’m just really weird. So Monday through Friday, I wake up at the same time every morning, 5 am. Okay, so I wake up at 5 am in the morning; I have a CrossFit class that I go to that starts right at 5:30. Now, luckily for me, my home is probably three minutes away from the CrossFit class. So that’s pretty awesome. So I can leave at 5:27 and get there on time. So I’m up at five, I mean, something real quick, you know, kind of combing my hair at least. So I don’t look like I’ve got that bed, a bedhead; I put on some clothes and get to CrossFit. CrossFit usually gets over by about 630 I’m home three minutes later, you know, getting ready for the day. And typically, by 7 am, I’m actually eating a real breakfast, you know, having some coffee, something like that. And usually, for that one hour before my three-year-old wakes up, but 45 minutes I’m reading. So every day, I read at least 45 minutes a day subjects, you know, business sales, persuasion influence. And I’ve actually done that since I was 20, 21 years old as a kid. I actually read three books a month religiously. And I listened to two audiobooks a month. So that’s five books a month, times 12 months. So that’s about 60 books a year, times about 22 years. So it’s been about 1400 different books. So at that point, you have to at least know something about sales and persuasion, and influence, guess at that point. So I read up until about 7:45 Eight, my daughter gets up, you know, we hang out for 3040 minutes do breakfast together. And I’m usually in the office by about 8:45, our corporate headquarters are in Scottsdale, Arizona, and it is only about five minutes away from my house as well. So I like to have places that are really, really close because I don’t like to drive everywhere. So I get into my office, you know, it’s 8:45 ish or so. And it just really depends on what my calendar is. Now what I tried to do, Ryan, you know, I do write a lot because we ride out, you know what, I have a book that’s been published with a co-author Jerry Acuff who’s the CEO of Delta Point that gets published, I believe, early fall by Morgan James Publishing, I think it’s our publishing company. That’s doing it, but so I try to write in the morning, so from like nine till about 11 or 11:30. Unless it’s a has, I try not to have any meetings on my calendar, no training calls I have to do for clients or anything from that nine to 11 or 11:30. And that’s my creative time. That’s when I have about two and a half hours to had to write the book, right? Yeah, it took me probably six months to do or, you know, we have another two any product that has to be written, and then we have to shoot it, you know, then we have to shoot it in the studio. So I have to write all of that out, you know, that could take a couple of months to do that. So whatever I have that, now I’m writing for, you know, Ink Magazine, I write for them, I think, two articles a month, so I have to write those articles out. So I try to have that as my creative time to get all of that done. Because what I do not do well at is like, let’s say, have a meeting from nine to 10, then let’s say, attending training from 10 to 11, oh, you’ve got 45 minutes to write something, then you’re on another training call, then like, my mind doesn’t work that way. Like, I need some time just to, like, not be bothered, if that makes sense. Okay, let’s say like 11 or 11:30 on, that’s when I’ve got scheduled, you know, meetings, like with, you know, maybe different people we’re looking at to do certain stuff. Right now, at this point, in our company, we have about 117 employees, so I’m not even the CEO anymore; I stepped down from being the CEO about 14 months ago. So my CEO does a lot of that stuff, which is great. You know, we have like a Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Sales Officer and people that kind of do all that stuff. Whereas the first year, I was the one hiring; I was the one doing all that stuff. So now it gives me a lot more time to just fulfill with our clients, which is, you know, the greatest, the greatest thing that can happen. So usually from like, 11:30, to, you know, the rest of the day, four o’clock on either podcasts like this one or let’s say I’m doing training calls for our clients, you know, could be a company could be an individual that’s in our one on one program, could be the group training that we do. And then typically, you know, that’s about it. I’m usually done probably around four 430 ish, sometimes even five; it just depends on what’s going on for the day. And then I usually come back and try to turn my phone off for two or three hours and play with my three-year-old and then listen to maybe a podcast or two at night or sometimes, you know, watch Million Dollar Listing New York, or Million Dollar Listing LA one of our clients is Ryan Serhant. He’s the star of Million Dollar Listing New York for Bravo. So I like to watch that, it’s kind of fun. But besides that, that’s my life. I’m pretty boring.
Ryan
Boring. Oh, actually, I love that you have a creative block, you know that? That nine to 11, I think you said that. I love that you, especially since it’s in the morning too. And you’re probably at your most creative; you’re guarding that time. It’s very smart,
Jeremy
And usually on like Fridays, so like, from my Fridays, a little bit different. So usually Friday because, you know, we record a lot of content. So, you know, last Friday, from, like, 8:30 in the morning till about two in the afternoon, all I was doing was recording content for our IG account. Now we just got an IG about five months ago; we already got like 60-some thousand followers on there; we’re growing that like a beast. We just got on Tik Tok two weeks ago, and we already got like 8000 followers in the first two weeks. So we’re making a ton of content, you know, got LinkedIn, Facebook, we get a lot of followers on our Facebook business page and different Facebook groups. So we’re always making new content as far as like little 60-second reels for IG or 30 seconds for Tik Tok or just whatever it is. And then we have a company that, like, chews that down and edits, edits it out. And then, you know, post it all the time, like three to four times a day on all of our different social media platforms. So usually, one Friday a month from, like, 8:30 to 2:30. All I’m doing is just filming that stuff, you know, different topics, different subjects, all that kind of stuff. Or let’s say that we need to make new faces to YouTube ads, or new Facebook ads, or whatever it is; sometimes, I would leave Friday for about four or five hours each week for just video work, if that makes sense.
Ryan
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And two things that stood out to me while you were talking. And I want to circle back to them. I love the habit of reading five books a month. Do you lump them into themes? For one month, you’re reading books and only about sales next month is all about personal growth. Like how do you select the books you’re reading?
Jeremy
Man, I don’t I’m weird. I just you know, just I just ordered books. I mean, 90 95% of the books I read, Ryan, are on sales, persuasion influence. I mean, that’s, that’s where my expertise is. That’s what I went to college for was behavioral science and human psychology. Like, I know one thing in the world. That’s it. You know, my wife would say like, Hey, you don’t even know how to go change the oil on the car. Well, maybe I could probably learn I could probably just watch YouTube. But I don’t want to do that. Right. Like, I know one thing. And I know that one thing, like, at an excellent rate, okay. Like, I’m like, people would say like, oh, you’re like Einstein. Well, yeah, and one thing but everything else. I’m, like, dumb as a rocket. So I would say I just kind of like, whatever the book is, like, if I see the book, I’m like, oh, that’s an interesting subject. And there’s, you know, Ryan, as you know, there are some books you read, and you walk away, and you’re like, wow, I didn’t really get anything out of that. Or, like, maybe you got one little golden nugget. But that one little golden nugget could help you make more money in anything that you’re doing or maybe help a relationship, or it could help you in your own personal life. I mean, you know what I mean? There are some books that just are going to be a lot better than others. There’s, so there are some books, right that I’ve read two, three, or four times, not just one time. So it’s an excellent, excellent book. And when I read books, I don’t talk about just reading to read a book, like, you’re just going through it fast to, like, chalk it up as another number; I read books to study the book, to mark up the book, to underline the book, it’s like a, you know, going back into college, and you’re like going through a class, and you’re like learning the material. That’s how I devour books. And when you do that, it typically stays with you much, much longer than if you’re just reading a book; it’s like, if you just read a book to read it and chalk it up as another book, it’s like, you’re gonna remember, like, 2% of that, you know, a couple of months later.
Ryan
Another takeaway I’m getting from just listening to what you’re sharing here is going one inch, why, but whenever 1000 feet deep, you know, you’re hyper-focused on improving your craft, which is books, and there’s going to be some books, you know, everybody listens, to hear that, that is really, really good that you’re, you want to read more than one time because you know, the second time you read it, you’re gonna get way more out of it than the first, because you’re gonna have a better understanding of what’s going on. All right, so then let me ask you, besides your own book, which I know isn’t out yet, what’s the best book that you’ve ever read on selling?
Jeremy
Well, first of all, I think a good book to read on selling from like a theory point of view, like, if you want an overview of really how selling has changed as far as like buying behaviors of the buyer and how prospects view salespeople, because you, you have to, you have to put yourself in your buyer, you get one of my good friends, Jerry Acuff says, you know, stop acting like a seller, and start thinking like a buyer. And once you start to understand how the buyer perceives you and how you trigger sales resistance by certain things that you say and or don’t ask, it causes you to be able to go out and get the right skills. So that doesn’t happen anymore. So a really good book that everybody should start with is by Daniel Pink, it’s called to sell as human to Sell Is Human by Daniel Pink; I would have everybody start with that book, it’s a really good book, on theory, really buying behaviors and how the modern day consumer in what we would call the Information Age, which is right now 2022, has drastically changed in how most salespeople have never caught up to that.
Ryan
I’m familiar with Daniel Pink because he’s really a researcher slash author. And so he does a lot of research with his books and studies and all that. So I’m sure it’s very, that’s very much backed up, right?
Jeremy
It’s a great book to start, for sure. Yeah.
Ryan
Another thing you said that I want to go back to I’m kind of deviating from normal questions because you keep on giving me things that I want to ask you about. Yeah. Which is fine. Just good. So you mentioned that you remove yourself from your, I think should CEO, you remove yourself from that position. So what do you do now? Why did you do that? And what was the strategy there?
Jeremy
Well, I’m the chairman now. So I’m, you know, I’m still the founder of the company. But the reason why I removed myself from being the CEO is the CEO. The CEO is really the person who runs the business, right? Who makes strategic maps of where the company is going? And that’s just not my forte; it’s just being real, like. My forte is training salespeople and training companies to help them sell way more of the products and services they know that is what I’m extremely talented at. But sometimes you might be talented in that field, Brian, but you might not be the greatest business owner; you might not make the best choices, like hiring vendors to do certain things for your company, right? And I think I was decent at that. But I knew to get my company to be like a nine-figure company; I was going to have to have somebody way more talented at running a company than I was I’d ever run a company. I was a sales professional. Right? You know, I eventually became a chief sales officer. But that’s way different than actually running a business. And when I did that, you know, the company. We’re just starting our fourth year. I mean, we’re not It’s not like we’ve been around for 25 years or anything. Like we’re still the New Kids on the Block. But the first year was just basically me and my assistant, who came over with me for my job. It was me and her, and that was about it. You know, and we did, we still did seven figures. Most of it was like 1.3 million in sales. In our first year with me and my assistant, I didn’t even have a salesperson. We did okay the first year, but we’re like, Okay, well, how do we triple this the second year, and then the second year, you know, halfway through, we brought on, you know, we brought on the CEO, we brought on a chief revenue officer, we started hiring salespeople and that type of stuff and we Forex our revenue from the year before. And then last year, we 5x that we won the Inc 5000 When we were in the top, the Inc 5000 You know have the Inc 5000 Has that list of the fastest growing companies in the United States every year. So we made that list last year we were ranked think 1200 something, and we were ranked number one by Inc 5000 list as the fastest growing sales training company in the United States, and I owe all of that, I would say, not all of it, but I owe a lot of that to bringing on the CEO, having him focused on running the business and building, you know, people around him, and letting me focus on the fulfillment with our clients and our sales trainers. And everything just grew times 10. And you know, this year, we’re, we’re going to double what we did the year before. So I think sometimes people like have this ego, like, I’ve got to be the CEO, I’ve got to be the head honcho. And I think after a while, you figured out like, hey, maybe that’s not my strength, maybe my strength is in marketing, or maybe my strength is in sales, or maybe my strength is in fulfillment, or coaching or whatever it is. And when you find the right team, you really can scale and go anywhere. But when you don’t have the right team around you. It’s very, very hard, no matter how great your product or services are, to really get to the next level; you have to have the right team around you. Sometimes it just takes time to find the right team.
Ryan
Yeah, absolutely. So basically, make sure they have the right team. And there they’re, sitting in the right seats on the bus. Yeah, that’s what it sounds like is so important.
Jeremy
I’m telling you, it’s so important. If you don’t have the right team, it’s just weird. And we’re still, and don’t get me wrong, like we’re not perfected model yet, either. I mean, we’re still building the right team. I think we’ve got the right marketing team in there now and some other stuff. But we’re always; we’re always looking for continued improvement in every aspect of every area of the business. And if you’re always looking for continued improvement and innovation and change the big word, sometimes you just there are certain things you have to change, you can’t be afraid of change, then you can really grow pretty rapidly.
Ryan
One add-on here to the lens of Jeremy, what’s the meaning of life?
Jeremy
The meaning of life? Like? I don’t know. Well, that’s, that’s a deep question, Ryan; the meaning to life to me is I believe that God puts us all here for a reason I believe we’re all born into, you know, the world at a certain time, to give that different contribution. And I think God gives us all talents and abilities. But sadly, most people never do anything with those, or they never expand on them. Right. And so with my ability, I believe that he gave me an I’ve expanded on that times, you know, 1000 with just learning and those type of things. My purpose is really to, you know, really help the world. In a sense, not just sales and training, but helping the world really see that when you have the right communication skills, it can change everything, you know, the wrong communication skills, let’s look at it for a second. You know, you know, when I was, you know, when you go to church, or whatever you read in the Bible, it talks about like, you know, there was a war in heaven, right? Everybody’s heard that you know, if you’ve ever been to church, some type of Christian denomination like there was a war in heaven, right? And a third of the host of heaven, you know, followed, you know, Satan in his plan, and then everybody else followed God’s plan. When the Bible says, there was a war in heaven. What do you mean by war? Was it a war fought with guns? Was it fought with tanks? Was it fought with swords or missiles? No, it was a war fought with words; it was a war of persuasion. It was a war of influence. So persuasion and influence can literally cause the world not to be in war. You know, you look at all these wars and everything, you know, you look at the war now, you know, with Russia and Ukraine, and you know, the West, right? And it’s all because there’s a misunderstanding on both sides, right? They can’t see each other’s points of view. And because of that, that’s why wars happen. I mean, look at any war, and that’s me; we’re going to a different subject. But if you look at any war that’s ever been, why did the war happen? Because each side couldn’t compromise. Each side did not put itself in the other side’s shoes. And because of that, it triggered ego. It triggered, you know, all these things that lead to war. So when you have the right skills, you know, as Stephen R. Covey says, it best he says, first seek to understand and then what be understood. And if we can’t understand that, that’s why all these bad things happen in my mind.
Ryan
That’s actually a good transition into my last question for you, Jeremy, that we’re going to wrap up with you sharing how people can connect with you. So the last question I want to I said, I wanted to ask you is about sales. And you know, we were just talking about communication a second ago. One word you used at the very beginning of the interview was questions; you help people ask the right questions. So for the entrepreneurs that are listening, are there any like when you’re going through a sales pitch sales presentation, are there any questions that are like a must cast? I know it probably depends, but are there any that come to the top of your mind that are a must-ask?
Jeremy
Well, I mean, there are tons that are all must ask. Like, there’s not just one magical question that you have to ask you to just this one question. They’re just going to magically buy right; it’s a whole process. So when you’re starting out in the conversation doesn’t matter if you sell the business to consumer, it doesn’t matter if you sell business to business like door-to-door cold calling inbound leads outbound leads; it’s really all the same, you first have to start off by asking what are called Connecting questions that, you know, take the focus off of you and put it on your prospect, you have to be able to know and understand how to ask what we call situation questions that help you in the prospect find out what the real situation is, because most prospects, quite frankly, don’t know what their situation is when you first start talking to them. Right? They don’t think about it deep enough. You have to ask what are called problem awareness questions that help the prospect find out what their real problems are, and not only what the real problems are, but what is the root cause of the problems. Like, how do they happen, right? And then not only that but how are those problems actually affecting them even personally, you know, one thing we all have to understand is that most of your prospects when you first start talking to them, don’t even know they have a problem in the first place. Or maybe they know they have a problem. But they don’t really know how bad that problem is. Or maybe they don’t understand the consequences of what will happen if they don’t do anything about solving that problem. So we have to understand how to do that. Okay. Now, once you learn advanced questioning skills, not only are you able to help them find one problem, but maybe you’re able to help them find two or three or four other problems that they didn’t even know they had. And when you’re able to do that, how do you think they start to view you? They start to view you as more of the expert or more of the trusted authority, as we would say, that’s really going to get them the things that they want. So then, how do we ask what so once we help them see what their situation is? Once we’ve helped them find through a question what their real problems are, how they’re affecting them the root cause of the problems, we have to help them to see what their future is going to look like, once all those problems are solved. We call those solution awareness questions. Okay? What is there, you know, here’s your situation. I know, we can’t see each other here, anything. But, you know, here, I’m doing some hand signals here where I’m at. But, you know, here’s where their current situation is; here’s where they want to be. So we call that their current state where they are now, here’s where they want to be that we call that their objective state their future, what’s the gap in between? It’s all these problems that your questions have helped them see that they now have that they didn’t realize they had before. So once we’re able to help them see what their future is going to look like, once all those problems are solved, we then want to ask what are called consequence questions. And I’ll just give you an example of one of these in order to have a lot of time. So consequence questions allow them to question their way of thinking of what will happen if they don’t do anything about solving the problem, which causes them to dig in their heels basically to defend themselves on why they have to change their situation now, not kick the can down the road. Okay, so let’s say if, you know, I try to give you an industry-specific example here, maybe a couple of different industries. But let’s say I was working on the script for one of our clients right before I got on this podcast with you but let’s say that you’re selling lead generation services, you know, your companies, you know, need better leads of higher quality leads so you sell lead generation services or marketing to you know, corporations looking to get better leads to their sales teams or more volume of leads to your sales teams, let’s say that’s their problem that leads they’re already getting they don’t feel or quality enough for you know, as far as what their avatar is. So consequence question for something like that might be okay, but what okay, John, what if you don’t do anything about this, though, and you guys keep getting this lower quality leads to your sales team, and your sales team, your sales, keep stagnating? The next three 612 months from now, like what happens in C? That would be a consequence question. Okay, but hold on, what if you don’t do anything about this, you keep getting these lower-quality leads to your sales team, and your sales keep stagnating. The next three, six, even 12 months from now? What happens, then? See, that’s a consequence. Okay? Or I might ask, like, this is kind of a generic one. Okay, but what are the possible ramifications? If you don’t do anything about solving this? Or have you thought about what would happen if your company doesn’t do anything about solving this issue? Those are consequence questions.
Ryan
It sounds like it almost makes them start to convince themselves that they need your services.
Jeremy
Yeah, that’s the highest form of persuasion Okay, that’s called any PQ neuro-emotional persuasion question, and as I said, I know we don’t have a lot of time to get into a bunch of questions, but if any of your audience or listeners want to learn more about those questions, they’re welcome to join our Facebook group. It’s called salesrevolution.pro. I think we gave you a link or something but then go to www.salesrevolution.pro. And right when they join Ryan, just have them check their messaging or their messenger or Facebook Messenger, and somebody on my team will tag them, and they’ll message them a free training called the CPQ one-on-one mini course. And it’ll have a list of different questions they can use for different sales situations they’re in doesn’t matter the industry they’re in, that will help them sell more automatically. And we go live in that Facebook group three or four times a week with different q&a is different subject matter training, especially on objections and different things like that. So they’re always welcome to join them if they want that free training.
Ryan
Perfect. Well, this was great, chock full of information. I really appreciate the Jeremy, and the show notes page; we’ll link up those resources, your Facebook Group, and your website. I appreciate your time and everything, everything you shared.
Jeremy
Thanks for having me on here. I’m like I said, I’m at my lake house here in Lake the Ozarks today, so thanks for having me on here. I looked at my camera like oh my gosh, you’re gonna get on the Ryan Podcast. I’m here at Lake House or Brandon here and grabbed a computer. I’m like, Oh my gosh, you’re gonna be late. So thanks. Thanks for having me.
Ryan
You did a great job. Thanks for everything you shared. Appreciate you, man. Thank you.
Announcer
Thanks for listening to the Morning Upgrade podcast. Please subscribe and review. And don’t forget to visit us at morningupgrade.com for more content.