Mike Montague: Building the Culture of Playful Humans

About Mike Montague: Mike Montague is the Director of Community Engagement and a Certified Trainer at Sandler, where he hosts the How to Succeed podcast, Sandler Summit, and other live events. He is also the author of LinkedIn The Sandler Way and numerous courses and content on sales and leadership. In addition, Mike is a podcaster at Playful Humans, a community designed to help the burned-out and bored get re-energized and engaged with life. He is a contributing writer on the Sandler blog and many other international publications, including the Thinking Bigger Business, Hubspot, and LinkedIn sales blogs. Also, he has entertained and educated thousands of audiences as a professional speaker, on-air radio personality for Mix 93.3 and 105.1 JACK FM, and MC for other live events. Mike has also been an opening act for Billy Idol and Frankie Valli as a DJ and was named one of Kansas City’s Rising Stars of Business in 2015. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Mike. <br /><br /> In this episode, Nancy and Mike discuss the following:Communication is the key in Sandler.OK, Not OK principles in sales.Social selling and social media marketing. Advantages of back-and-forth conversation over blasting messages on social media.Social selling definition and purpose.Fewer connections lead to more conversations.Playful Humans - a space for happy people.Why salespeople should be happy to be productive?<br /> Key Takeaways: <br /> I fell in love with the communication principles and people deserve respect, and it should be an adult-to-adult conversation, and learning how to be an adult in a conversational selling kind of way with Sandler was really a cool experience for me.Social selling is just adding people’s information and opportunities to your pipeline by using any type of sales or social media platform.From a marketing perspective the more connections you have on LinkedIn, the better, the wider your reach, but from a sales perspective, it's actually the deep relationships that matter.We forget that happy people do more work.The harder you try to sell, the less likely you are to get that. "So as human beings, we can only keep track of about 150 to 250 relationships at any given time, we just don't have the bandwidth. And it's an interesting number. It's through a lot of scientific research. It goes back to even when humans were in tribes, wandering the planes and stuff. It was like at about 150, you see them start to split off because you just can't know everybody, and you can't keep close to relationships with that many people. So, what happens with salespeople is... They start getting weaker relationships. They start chasing weaker deals and they start missing things from their ideal clients because they're not paying attention to them. " – MIKE "It is interesting to me that when you take yourself and your work less seriously, you can become more productive. People equate hard work with success. And I don't think that's true. It depends on the work you're doing. If you're building a deck or a brick wall - sure. The more work you do, the higher the wall is going to get, but in selling, that's not true. And selling the harder you try to sell, the less likely you are to get that. " – MIKE “Do not be afraid to be yourself. So, whether that's in sales, in social selling with LinkedIn, or the kind of personal branding and play work that I do with Playful Humans, I think we try to fit in often too. And that makes us boring and the same as everybody else. That is when you embrace your weirdness and your silliness and your personality, and then go find people that want that rather than trying to make yourself into something that ot