OasisLMS

The Enlightened Sales Manager 

Episode 1 (Pilot): Sales Has Changed, Human Nature Hasn't 

with Greg Barnes, hosted by Mark Guardiola 

About this episode 

The pilot episode of The Enlightened Sales Manager. Greg Barnes sets out the philosophy behind the podcast and explains why he is bringing it to market now. His argument is that selling has changed dramatically over the past two decades, but human nature has not, and that too much of the current sales conversation is chasing tools and fads at the expense of the fundamentals. 

At the heart of the episode is the concept the podcast is named after: enlightened self-interest. Greg walks through an exercise from his Management in Transition course in which participants list the qualities of a good human being and find that all of them transfer to the qualities of a good sales manager, with one exception. Selflessness. In a commercial context, selflessness is replaced by enlightened self-interest: the recognition that to get what you want, you must first help your people get what they want. It is the mindset shift that separates a boss from a leader. 

What you will take away 

• Why Greg believes selling has changed but human nature has not, and what that means for how we lead sales teams today. 

• The exercise behind the name of the podcast: how the virtues of a good human being map onto the qualities of a good sales manager, and the one that doesn't transfer. 

• Enlightened self-interest as a leadership operating principle, drawing on Zig Ziglar's idea that to get what you want, you must first help others get what they want. 

• The mindset shift most new sales managers miss: the manager works for the team, not the team for the manager. 

• Why an over-reliance on sales tools (and now AI) is making people faster at doing the wrong things, and how to keep the fundamentals in view. 

• The one principle Greg would defend as strongly today as he would have thirty years ago: people buy from people. 

• Mortimer Adler's four goods of the mind (knowledge and information at the lower level, wisdom and understanding at the higher level), and why you can forget what you know but never what you understand. 

• What the Management in Transition course covers, who it is designed for, and how it aims to create like-mindedness rather than uniformity.