HL Conf Call October 9,12

The main ideas from this information are: - The importance of having an engaged and knowledgeable upline in a business. - The questions that new recruits should ask about the training and support they will receive. - The critical role of training, coaching, and development in determining success. - The story of someone who achieved great success by receiving proper training and applying the fundamentals of the business. - The need for individuals to take responsibility for their own training and development if their upline is not providing it. One of the issues that I've seen over the years that I want to talk about today was people being in the business and having an upline that just isn't really engaged or doesn't know what they're doing or that sort of thing. What do you do when you have an upline that's not doing the job right? It happens, it happens unfortunately, and what do you do? The questions that are really important that aren't asked often enough from a new recruit's point of view is one, how much training, coaching, and development will I receive? That would be one of the things that if I was getting involved in a business like Primerica, I would be asking that question. What am I going to get in training, coaching, and development? What are you going to do to help me succeed? You need to answer that question as well. If you're going to develop a team, you need to decide how much training, coaching, and development are you going to give to people that you bring on board. The second question is how much time, support, and help am I going to get or receive from my manager or my upline or whatever you want to call them to ensure that I succeed? Of course, that's a two-way street. If I'm going to ask that question, then I've got to make a commitment. I would always tell people what I was going to do to help them do that. I was going to train them, coach them, and teach them those seven fundamentals. I'm going to teach you how to get results, how to set up appointments, how to do a great presentation, how to overcome all the objections, how all the products work, how to recruit somebody to the kitchen table, and how to get them trained. You as a new trainee need to make a commitment that you're going to follow my instruction. You're going to follow my lead. You're going to do what I ask you to do, so it works both ways. These issues are critical to success, obviously. The training, coaching, and development unit is totally critical. I talk about that incessantly because, to me, it's the number one issue in our business, period, or really in any business. How well you train your people is going to determine how successful they ultimately are, and then, of course, in turn, how successful you are. They can make or break a new representative with experience that's hired in our Prime America. If there's no sales manager, no sales training, no sales coaching, no recruiting coaching, or no development coaching, that's going to really hurt a person's business. There's no question about that. That's why I always made that the priority because, in the end, you are only going to be as good as how developed you are and how much commitment, focus, and energy devote to that. Your people and your business is only going to be as good as how developed they are, how competent they are, how well-trained they are. In the end, their competency level, their skill level is going to determine whether they can succeed long range or are going to be washed out of the business like so many people do. Unfortunately, some representatives are called upon to effectively succeed without a manager, without an upline. I know when I started working with Chris Howard back in 1991, he was under another organization and that person had left and he was looking for a new upline because they had left the company and they gave Chris the opportunity to go where he wanted to go. He had been in the business already for several years at that point, maybe seven or something like that. He was making $100,000 a year, so he was fairly successful, but not anywhere he wanted to be. He told me that his team, his upline, they didn't believe in any training. They just didn't train. It was all motivation and all just recruit, recruit, recruit and everything will work out. After six or seven years, he was making $100,000. In fact, they called themselves the no training group. That's what they did. They actually looked down on it. Somebody like me who was totally focused on training was looked down upon and was like a pariah, if you will. In fact, in a lot of prime America, that was a big deal at that time. I was always a Toll Hopkins and personal development and I talked about that incessantly and I got a lot of flack for that. I didn't care because I knew that it's retarded that if you don't train your people, how do you expect them to do well? How do you expect them to stay in the business? How do you expect them to succeed in a big way if they don't know what they're doing? To me, it never made any sense and still a lot of people follow that train of thought which to me is completely idiotic. Training is everything. In any company, in any business, in any sport, you name it, in music or acting or whatever it is, you go into restaurants, you can see right away if the people are trained well or not. I was in a store the other day and I went in two different stores looking to buy a couple of things, clothing articles. One store, man, the guy was fantastic. He was helpful. He was going out of his way to answer questions and to show me other stuff. Then we went to another store and it was the complete opposite. There was no training. These people were useless. When I told my wife Jan, I said, that's the difference right there. This is the problem with most companies in America, why they struggle, is their people are not trained. They don't know what they're doing and they're not any good and they do everything incorrectly and then they wonder why they struggle with growing their sales and their businesses. It always strikes me that people get in our business and they don't understand how critically important training is to their ultimate success and especially to their people's ultimate success. What happened with Chris, I went to Chris's office in Las Vegas. I was living in Southern California at the time. I flew to Chris's office in Las Vegas on Wednesday mornings and then I would stay there for a couple of days, Wednesday and Thursday, and then I would fly back in the afternoon on Fridays because I had to do my meeting with my team on Saturday. What I did when I was there, I did that for 12 weeks in a row. I went every one minute commitment and all I focused on was how to stuff. How to prospect, how to set appointments, how to do an awesome presentation, how the products work, how to overcome objections, how to recruit somebody and then once you recruit them, how to get them in the field, how to get their list. I focused on teaching them how to destroy cash value, how to sell mutual funds, all the stuff, just all fundamentals. I didn't do one ounce, nothing, zero, nada of motivation with them because they didn't need motivation. Chris Howard was highly motivated. He did not need me to tell him a story or to motivate him. He needed to be taught how do I get results, Hector, like you're getting results. At that time, my business was exploding. We were growing like crazy. All he wanted to know, all he needed to know is how are you getting those results? What do I need to do to get the results you're getting? What I focused on was teaching him exactly what I was doing and what I had done with my team to create that kind of business and that kind of volume at that time. That's all I did. Twelve months later, his income was right up shy of $100,000, right at $90,000-some thousand at that time. The next year, he made $286,000. Next year, he made like $380,000 or $400,000. Five years later, he was making a million dollars a year. What he did is he took those things that I taught him, all those fundamentals, and he started doing them. First he managed himself. He got wide. He averaged about four or five recruits, personal recruits, for like five years in a row, something like that. He trained tons of people, taught them how to close, got them on learning how to overcome all the objections, all the things I just talked about. His business just exploded. He became a multi-millionaire. He's got a business that's worth millions of dollars now. That was the key right there. There's an old adage that lawyers say, right? A lawyer who represents themselves in court is a fool for a client, or they say a doctor who treats himself is a fool for a patient. Surely a salesperson or a recruiter or a builder of business that would undertake to manage themselves would be equally foolish, but the truth is that's not true because I did that. I managed myself. I never really had an upline that was a trainer either. When I got in the business, I was in the same situation. We didn't really have training like I thought we should have. It was just mostly motivation. Sometimes a representative in Prime America, they have no choice but to learn to be their own manager, their own leader, their own trainer because their trainers or uplines don't do it. They don't do a very good job of it. They don't think it's important. They don't focus on it. They think they need to motivate, and they don't teach people exactly how to do the business. If you're working for a super entrepreneurial company in Prime America, you need to know how to do all this stuff. You need the knowledge and understanding how sales and recruiting works. If you don't have the knowledge and understanding of how sales and recruiting works and how to do that, then you're going to have a heck of a time building a business. If a person's been hired in Prime America to produce results, they have to find a way to do that in order to help themselves to grow their own company within Prime America as well as grow Prime America and as well as supporting themselves and their family. They've got to figure out how to do that. They've got to find a way to do that. The way you do that is you manage yourself. If you can't count on an upline to manage you to do the right things to train you and develop you and teach you the fundamentals, then you've got to do it yourself. If you're a new rep in the business or you've been in the business a while and you feel like you have an upline that's not doing the job, then you need to take the bull by the horns if you will. All people coming into business, all business people for that matter, they have a responsibility. You have a responsibility to develop yourself to the fullest potential with or without an upline or a managed support. You have that responsibility. In the end, all the real responsibility lies with you. You can go and say, I didn't get any training. I didn't have an upline that took care of me. That's BS. I didn't either. Lots of people haven't and they still want. There is no shortage of training material on POL, on the internet, in bookstores. You go to Amazon. You go anywhere. There is so much training material to help you become a great salesperson, a great leader, whatever you need to be, a great recruiter. If you're motivated, so the operative word is motivated. If you are motivated and are willing to do the work to master that material, whatever that material you need to learn, whether it's leadership or time management skills or sales skills or recruiting skills, those are all skills that are learnable. Everybody who is really good at those skill sets, they learned them. They don't come out of the womb and the doctor whacks you on the rear end and you go, oh, this person has all the seven fundamentals down. They've got sales down. They've got training. They've got leadership and time management skills. No. All those things are learned. They're all learned things. Even if you have somebody above you or your leader is not doing the job, there's no excuse for you not learning how to do it, none whatsoever. You need to take responsibility. In our override, each of us has a response to do what's necessary to produce results. We have an obligation to manage ourselves and use all the human attributes that lead to success, including our self-discipline. Look, these are key elements. These words I'm about to share with you are critical for your ultimate success, self-discipline, your determination, your initiative, your resourcefulness, your persistence, your tenacity, your focus, your relentlessness to succeed and to master all of the most important things you need to master to be successful. That obligation to manage ourselves falls on us. It doesn't fall on anybody, our upline, our wife, our husband, our children, our mom and dad, all that. In the end, you've got to decide that you're going to do that. Truth be told, a lot of people in the business who work in large organizations aren't always better off than those with no sales manager. Some are ignored or neglected. That happens sometimes. Sometimes you're ignored or neglected. Some are poorly managed. Some work for managers who have no training or no development themselves or no coaching either. You have to break the cycle and go find the tools like I did, like a lot of other people did to learn how to sell successfully, to recruit successfully without that manager if you have to. You have to decide to do that. The thing is, I have a website, hectorlamarck.com. There's tons of audios on that. You can buy my system that I developed years ago. Things have changed, but the fundamentals never change. They don't ever change. If you want to be successful, there is a way to make that happen. People that are driven, they figure it out. They go get the information. They learn it. They study. They're self-disciplined. They work on themselves and then they figure it out. Then the real smart ones, they teach what they've learned to the people that they bring on board. They don't make the same mistake that their upline's made. Look, you have to do the thinking, the planning, the goal setting. You need to hold yourself accountable. All successful people do that. All really successful people hold themselves accountable. Look, I never had anyone hold me accountable. My wife has, but not in prime America. I never had an upline to hold me accountable, to call me to make sure I'm doing things right or get my goals. I never had anybody do that, ever. Not one time in my career has that ever happened. Is it helpful to have a manager that cares about you and has experience and is willing to help you produce shows? Is it helpful? Yes, of course it's helpful, but sometimes it's not critical for you to succeed. What you need to do is you need to see your own blind spots and what your weaknesses are. You know what your weaknesses are. You know what you're not strong in. You know if you have a little problem with prospecting, you have a problem with recruiting or you have a problem with setting appointments, you have a problem with overcoming objections or you have a problem with whatever. Knowing how to do an F&A or knowing how to do a great presentation or whatever. Maybe you have a time management issue, you know what your issues are. You all know exactly where you're strong and where you're not as strong. What you've got to decide to do is to shore up the weaknesses that you have. For me, my biggest weakness was I was a procrastinator. I used to procrastinate. Put everything off. Put it off. Put it off. Put it off. I did that all the time. That was a big problem for me. What I did was, number one, I bought a seminar on time management through Franklin, the company Franklin Planner Group, that company. I went to a class. It was a two-day class that I went on learning how to manage your time and prioritize. I went and did that because I knew that was a problem for me. Then I put on my desk, do it now. Then I put it everywhere I could put it, do the most productive thing possible at any given moment, which I learned from Hopkins. That's one of the most important things. Are you doing the most productive thing possible at every given moment? If you are, guess what? You're going to succeed in a huge way. If you're not, then it's going to be a lot slower for you, if at all. You've got to see where you're weak. Take an assessment. Then you've got to say, okay, let's say you're a little bit weak with your presentation. Then what you need to do is you need to videotape your presentation. Work with an upline. Work with your spouse. Just do your presentation until your presentation gets better and better. One of the things I used to do when setting up appointments, every time I would have an appointment setting session, but I would do that at home. I'd be setting appointments for the following week or whatever. I would always audio tape. I would put a mirror in front of me so I could look at my expression as I was doing it. I wanted to be smiling. I wanted to be up. I wanted to have the right look on my face. I'd have a mirror in front of me. I'm taping it so that after the session I can listen back and say, whoa, that was not very good. I need to stop saying that, or that was really good. I need to continue doing that. Little by little I kept refining my appointment setting approach by practicing, drilling, rehearsing, checking to see how I was doing. Today, man, with the video, you can video yourself with your phone and you can see how you're doing. Because there's nothing like the reality of really watching yourself and seeing how you're doing things and how you're saying things. A lot of times you think you're saying things in the right way, but then when you watch it or you hear it, you go, oh, my God. I used to say that. I used to go, oh, my God, that was terrible. The uh, uh, uh, uh, or those pauses or whatever you're doing. I would practice, drill, and rehearse over and over because I wanted not to be good. I wanted to be great. I wanted to get great results. So I did that. I practiced, practiced, practiced. Now this sounds like, oh, I don't know if I want to practice that much. That's a lot of work. Well, doing that has paid me millions and millions of dollars and allowed me and my family to get financially independent to have an incredible life. So I don't know. That's a pretty small price to pay to watch, videotape your performance or audio tape your performance and check that and keep refining it. When people do a play, for example, we know what they do. They rehearse. They rehearse, they rehearse, they rehearse. Or even when they shoot a movie. They'll shoot. I mean, my daughter just shot a movie recently. It's called The Pretty One. It's going to be coming out sometime next year. With Zoey Kazan and Jake Johnson, right, guys on the show, let's see, on The New Girl or something like that, with Zoey Deschanel. So I went to one of their sets one day where they were shooting a scene. One scene they spent an entire day on one scene, shooting it, reshooting it, shooting it again from different angles just so they can get it just right and then they take the very best one. But the point I'm making is that when they shoot movies, they shoot, shoot, and reshoot and reshoot until it's just right, right? And they practice, drill, rehearse. In a play, they practice, practice, practice for probably weeks and months prior to the play going on to Broadway, for example. Why? To make sure they get it exactly right, okay, because they want it to succeed and they want it to come off as natural and they want it to come off as seamless and they want it to seem like, you know, take you away so that you don't really think they're acting, that they're really just being that character. Well, the same thing is true when you're doing anything in the business, whether it's prospecting or setting appointments or doing a presentation or anything, the more you practice, the more you drill, the more you rehearse, the more you get down exactly what you need to do, right, the better job you're going to do, the more effective you're going to be, the more people are going to want to do business with you and join your business. Folks, this is common sense that people aren't doing this. It's just like, really? You don't get that? You don't get that the level of your preparation determines the level of your success? You really don't get that? How could you not get that, right? How could you not get that? So basic, right? The level of preparation of your people is going to determine their success and your success. How do you not understand and completely internalize and get that? That is incredible to me, something as simple as that, right? Look, don't worry, right? You have POL. You have tons and tons of books and audios and videos on how to succeed. There's no excuse regarding how to do it if you're self-motivated. Now you've just got to go do it. You've got to manage yourself. You've got to produce results. You've got to learn to be as effective as you can be. Your responsibility to yourself and your team is critical when it comes to development and growth, folks. What results do you need to produce, right, recruits and sales? With or without a manager, what do you need to do to get where you want to go, to get your promotion, to get going, to get to the next level? Look, do the most successful people you know always need someone to hold them accountable to taking the actions that they commit to? No, they don't. Talk to somebody who's really successful and ask them if they needed somebody to hold them accountable to get to work every day, to do the things they need to do, to do the uncomfortable stuff. You know what the answer is? No. It may not be one or two, but the majority of people, they don't need that because, you know, they don't even have that. They don't have a great support system like you do in Primerica where you have up lines and the company that's putting out tons of material to help you succeed. That's not normal. If you were going to go open up your own business right now, if you were going to go open up a retail store of some sort, any shoe store, a clothing store, even a Jamba Juice or anything, okay, you're not going to have all of the people, you know, unless you do a franchise, right? If you're going to open up a typical business, there's nobody to help you, to keep you motivated, to hold you accountable, to teach you all the things that you need to do to be successful. For most people that start business, it's all trial and error, which is why the majority of businesses fail. People have to go through two or three or four businesses before they figure out what they need to be doing. In Primerica, you have all kinds of support and help, right, incredible amount of help. Just P.O.L. at $25 a month you spend on that. I mean, that's priceless. Are you kidding me? $300 a year for all the videos, audios, and training, and information, and all that you have at your disposal. Folks, that's not normal. That is not normal. That's amazing. The back office that you have in Primerica that processes all your business and stuff, that's not normal. All the technology that we have now that's always improving, do you think that's normal in businesses, that you were going to start a business on your own, that you could do that? No, it's not normal. You are in a very unique, phenomenal situation where you can succeed in a huge way because of all the support you have. Even if you don't have a great upline, it doesn't matter. It's not going to determine whether you're successful or not. You are going to determine that. You and your motivation, and like I said earlier, your persistence, your self-discipline, your determination, your initiative, your resourcefulness, your tenacity, your focus, your relentless quest to succeed, your persistence, all those things, that's what's going to determine where you end up. It's not your upline. Believe me, it's not your upline. You might want to use that as an excuse, but it's not your upline. It's you and your self-discipline, your work ethic, your level of motivation to succeed, folks. That's what's going to determine where you end up. Nothing more, nothing less. Talk to you next week.